As admitting that solar is now a superior and cost effective means of energy means admitting that the US is no longer top dog.
As empires are built on mastering a source of energy.
the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships.
the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution.
America mastered oil
now the Chinese have Solar.
even in places like Africa etc -- places were the grid was never available for $2k -- you can power your whole house with solar and lithium batteries. Panels are getting cheaper, same as batteries. Once the tipping point is reached for electric vehicles both personal and commercial - transition to fully electric mobility happens
I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.
American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.
The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.
Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.
It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.
But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently.
PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).
Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.
When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/...
California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.
It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.
Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.
https://finance-commerce.com/2026/02/solar-panels-silver-to-...
The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.
I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.
The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.
The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.
I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
So calling it a constant throughout history is only true in the way that slavery still exists today, in that you could find it somewhere on the globe.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast. and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
Except that it definitely was.
I think more importantly, steam mills solved for a problem the south did not have. If one was to tell a southerner, I have a technology that will save on labor costs, the southerner's response would have been "what are labor costs?"
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.
I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.
Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
New Orleans has entered the chat.
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.
Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.
Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy.
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
not quite. 'Slavery' has been around that long. 'Chattel Slavery' started in the 1600s and peaked in the 1800s. So like, half a millenia.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
In 1861.
> Peter the Great converts all house slaves into house serfs, effectively making slavery illegal in Russia.
1861 ditches serfdom, too.
Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.
And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.
The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.
I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?
"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"
Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.
Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
Interesting life in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
And yet, we invent things like the cotton gin, "enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation", patented in 1794.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.
The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/m...
If you ignore the part that makes you wrong, then you are right.
Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.
If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.
I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.
It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.
Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually had a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.
How do markets build infrastructure as large as an LNG terminal without the government tipping the scales with various guarantees? How do you build a literal coastline of refineries without government clearing the way with permissive regulations? How can you say "let markets figure it out" when the US military is the acquisition department of Halliburton's Iraqi joint venture?
Pretending "markets can figure it out if we just remove government subsidies" is hopelessly naiive. Geopolitics is mostly energy policy.
Nobody argued as much. My point is the net effect of social pressure on the energy transformation has been costly—financially and politically—for relatively little bang.
A whole class of parasites who have made their lives as highwaymen on the densest energy source (outside of uranium) -- that literally comes out of the ground -- have spent at least the last 20 years actively suppressing alternatives.
In some places (see Alberta, Canada), they have literally outlawed renewable developments.
In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative.
There is no "free market" way out of the current situation regardless of how economically viable solar is. In the real world markets and power are intrinsically linked.
It's also actually also an emergency
On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.
They’ll fight tooth and nail
not crazy especially as slavery was supplanted by debt, which is in a way fractional slavery (minus the chattel part ofc)
The current political landscape has me black pilled but on the technology side we have a lot to look forward to.
Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.
So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.
If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.
Alternatively, it could mean that we would no longer need to do that as a lot of materials that are restricted by energy costs become viable. If energy is almost free you can extract a lot of trace materials from almost anywhere.
> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna
China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.
So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.
Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime
(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)
you really can't imagine a better situation than humans owning humans?
You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them.
You need to do basic medical care.
And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk.
Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision.
Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.
I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?
Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.
This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.
There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.
There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?
We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.
oh mate
I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.
Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).
At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).
"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".
HN is truly lost.
I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.
Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.
Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]
So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).
We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].
It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.
0. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of...
My overlay of the data: https://eia.languagelatte.com/
Raw data: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0
If I were doing this I'd be looking for a partner that is already in the business. The politics are a lot more complicated than the technology. It would be very easy to get screwed over if you don't know which palms to grease.
> "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
Indeed. The US farms almost 60 million acres for biofuels, the size of the state of Oregon. These arguments do not come from serious people imho. People are simply married to their rural identity and ag cosplay, despite it being wildly inefficient and subsidized by the federal government.
https://kaufman.substack.com/p/at-least-31-states-consider-o...
https://cleantomorrow.org/reports/
(have installed 100kw+ in residential solar, and have experience following along for a ~100MW project)
Even the hardware, land acquisition, and permitting stories would be different, right?
We have generation mix, load, and pricing data. Both real time and historical
I’m trying to source a battery power pack and cheap panels.
Assuming you're in the US, new solar modules go for about $0.28/watt.
If you dump the entire $1k into just modules, that will get you about 3.5kW of panels. Which will probably hit your target on sunny days during the summer.
But that doesn't include inverters if you want to do a grid tie, or batteries if you don't, or wiring, or whatever you're going to mount the panels on.
Another way to think about this is that $1,000 is about 20 tanks of gas, assuming you get 400 miles per tank that's 8,000 miles, which is less than a year of driving for the average American. You can increase your budget and still come out way ahead.
The other consideration is that this scheme only works if you only drive at night, otherwise you'll need a battery to store that power while your car is out and about during the day, or you'll need to grid tie and use the grid as your battery.
Essentially co-dependant renewables, the entirety of West Coast through Colorado balancing primarily between solar and hydro (and natgas peakers). Nothing like Québec (¡hydro!), but still something.
[0] <https://i.imgur.com/QMclWZu.png> grey "other" line == sold to neighboring grids
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If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits" [i.e. not having to follow federal regulations], they could be sloshing their primarily wind-derived kWHs into an even more-beautiful grid of flowing renewables.
Instead, 10-year winter storms risk hundreds dead and billion$ lo$t.
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TVA is in planning stages for its second massive pump-storage facility — but Texas is probably wiser in its nascent battery storage investment [1], instead. TVA's Racoon Mountain Pumphouse is definitely impressive, but with all the upcoming "depleted" car batteries being reconditioned into the stationary electric storage market... water power storage is probably the more environmentally-damaging method (definitely more expensive?).
[1] <https://imgur.com/a/Nm0TFs1>
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Screenshots via <https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...>
[nerd warning: my favorite real-time dataset]
US Lower-48 Primary Energy Sourcing: <https://i.imgur.com/BWXugy2.png>
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My layperson recommendations to industry [I'm blue-collar, electrician]: reduce coal, increase nuclear; increase micro battery storage (e.g. see Chattanooga's EPB implementations); maintain but stop building dams/pumped storage.
Solar/wind/nuclear/nat.gas will be able to run everything once we have enough battery storage to handle daily peaks. In a few more years we will be entirely able to remove our dependance from toxic coal [2]
Currently, even though it pains me to say this, ERCOT has one of the most mature battery systems in the world.
Everything else is valid though.
As a fifth-generation former Texan, I understand "separatist mentality." ERCOT's buy/sell market is perhaps also the most purely capitalistic marketplace in existance (and among least-regulated, in first-world); for these reasons, winter-proofing funding is terrible and outages likely when the system is stressed (e.g. approximately every decade Texas loses power during winter storms) — which is also when generating profits are maximized (orders of magnitude increases).
Certain deregulated-market Texans are still paying off powerbills from years-old storms, a few cold days of billing often exceeding the rest of the year's usage.
plus it seems ERCOT has learned and the grid seems fine now
Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam
Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.
I'd expect there's not a big effect on the ultimate amount of water being released downstream either way.
The max is like a car engine’s redline. That the car can hit it doesn’t mean you should at all times.
From that https://youtu.be/jvnaiHFT6nQ is a visualization of the water releases for the river to allow the water to get to the right dam for the anticipated power use.
7MW is the amount of power you can get from a couple of diesel gensets, waaaay smaller than even a small power plant
[https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/power-systems/electri...]
edit: Parent got edited; it was talking about $0.02/kwh initially.
Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?
tesla isn't great value any more. For a while powerwalls were the shit And the powerwall three is nice, with direct DC charging as well as islanding.
But, only 13kwh still, and internet dependency, and very expensive.
I currently have enphase micro inverters and a power wall 2. It was the right mix at the time.
But, if you have the space, which I think you do, An insulated shed for a 19" rack, and choose any one of the many battery unit makers. Its about $200 per kwh now (in UK prices, I'm not sure what tarrifs are doing for you)
then get a frame for your solar (or build a barn and roof it with solar, its cheaper than 12mm plywood at the moment.)
Have micro inverters, they are more expensive, but solid state, less likely to catch fire, do MPPT better, and are not a single point of failure.
You'll need backup for when solar doesn't cover your daily needs, so either grid or some other power source.
For the panels I did whatever was cheapest on signature solar. For batteries and inverter I did eco-worthy. (eBay for that, they run sales pretty often) in total is was $1000 for the panels (that included delivery) and around $1200 for the battery and inverter. If you have a truck then you might be able to find cheaper panels locally.
On YouTube check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He is a certified electrician and publishes part lists and plans that are easy to follow.
I like the MidNite solar controllers.
LiFePO4 batteries are great, with a few caveats:
- you must use batteries from the same batch, ie you can't upgrade capacity piecemeal, to avoid degrading the new ones
- cable lengths are important because even small differences in resistive losses between batteries can mean that one battery is doing more charging / discharging
- you can't charge below 0\*C, which I'm assuming could be a problem in New EnglandIf you're permanently there, it shouldn't be a concern. Sounds like modern BMS can disable charging at low temperatures so maybe not a worry for you at all if you're buying new batteries.
You dont need a company to do this for you, unless you want pay $$ to connect wires.
From what I've heard Tesla has a high cost/energy storage rate and you'd be better of going with something else (even if you have a tesla) but it would boil down to are you wanting to set this up yourself or hire a professional to do all the wiring.
>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?
Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over many years to not incur non-starter level costs.
You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.
“You are being misled about renewable energy technology”
Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
one of the few good things Rick Perry did for TX was upgrade the grid so West Texas wind power can reach the main cities. Once West TX showed renewables could make a profit then there's not much anyone, left or right, could do to stop it. The lobbyists made sure of that.
Southwest Texas, where all the fracking took place, also turns out to be good for solar. It's very flat, sunny, and has pretty stable weather. I guess the grid is beefed up and accessible in that region because of the oil/gas industry, I've seen solar farms out there that are so big it's hard to describe. Imagine seeing a shimmering blue that looks like a lake on the desert horizon but then you get to it and it's just miles of solar panels. Again, the moment solar turned a profit there was no stopping it.
A lot of folks are spreading the message 'it's not right vs left but up vs down when in reality its both.
Besides the whole petro money and lobbyism thing that drove the US politics since Edwin Drake?
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
In practice: https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2026/0116/1553440-mayo-wind...
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.
Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.
And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].
It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.
That's what happens when the "Leader of the Free World" is 79 with dementia with memories of the 1970s oil crisis.
We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
No, I am not condoning anything here, just pointing something out.
I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone.
Edit for ratelimiting:
> You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
No. I was simply saying the oil is useful in the military-industrial complex, and it does have value. I've said this twice already. I cannot say if this value will be realized, and for the third time, I don't condone it.
You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/05/venezuelan-...
> The gamble is a long game, with no guarantee of success. Returning Venezuela’s crude production to 3m barrels of oil a day would require 16 years of work and investment totalling $185bn (£137bn), according to figures from Rystad Energy, a global consultancy.
> At least $30-35bn of international capital would need to be committed in the next two to three years to make this scenario plausible, Rystad said. “This could only be financed by international oil companies, which will consider investments in Venezuela only if they have full confidence in the stability of the country’s systems and its investment climate for international oil and gas players,” it added.
For planes. For no other major use of hydrocarbons is it the primary concern.
I'm super optimistic about green energy and in favor of expanding it.
But also acutely aware it's barely putting a dent on energy use despite year-on-year record levels of capacity install (>90% of new capacity is green), which far exceeds expert expectations every single year. Non-renewables keep growing, forecasts and ambitions were cut by the Trump admin, and it is expected that the latest economic revolution's (AI) main bottleneck is going to be energy by the end of the year.
We have essentially blown past the paris accord thresholds (we've seen months of +1.5c temperature, which was the limit we envisioned in 2015) and despite renewables far exceeding expectations, they completely fell short of what is necessary pre-2023. Post-2023 you have Trump derailing renewables wherever he can and AI increasing demand even further.
It really looks pretty hopeless and frankly it's sad that there is no real conversation about this, which seems to be an existential question for the generation living in 2100 and beyond.
You're also now getting to the point that adding new capacity is increasing the amount of renewable energy that is being curtailed (i.e. thrown away), meaning while renewables get cheaper over time, the rate of things getting cheaper will slow down as renewables must be increasingly paired with storage investments (which are also getting cheaper but introduce additional cost).
For example, sunny Cyprus curtailed 13%, 29% and 49% (!!) of its solar generation in 2023 to 2025 respectively. Yes last year half of the solar power that was produced, was thrown away, because of a lack of demand-supply balancing. Cyprus is uniquely poorly positioned (high solar potential, small country with a single small timezone, no interconnectors to offload surplus to other countries, no storage facilities etc) but it's still a sign of things to come. Further generation will increasingly need to be paired with significant storage, or it's partially wasted.
That doesn't leave much left when you look at the energy flow once you remove domestic, commercial and transportation usage and replace it with electricity. A tiny amount left for plane s(and reducing per flight as planes get more efficent and battery planes start coming to market), and industrial gas usage.
https://www.energyvanguard.com/attachment/llnl-us-energy-flo...
I commented here in a recent HN energy post about my surrounding jurisdictions and the exploding utility costs per PJM that literally have governments suing each other. Just today one of those local jurisdictions announced a utility bill financial credit incentive for residents to attend a meeting to learn about what some already know intimately. Link is paywalled of course.
https://www.newarkpostonline.com/news/newarkers-can-earn-40-...
We are witnessing the accelerated adoption of local generation and storage driven by the economic costs of energy that has been directly and indirectly subsidized yet consumption is certainly not equal. As more and more move to self generate and store, per the meetings suggestion, the negative feedback loop is already in motion rising costs even more for those dependent on a centralized system.
For those that can see the light and where it is going; invest accordingly.
0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025
China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025
North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...
(no current oil commodity exposure)
Then why has both global [0] and US [1] consumption been rising year-over-year for the last few years and projected to continue to rise [2]?
All those articles you're posting about short term changes in the dynamics of the oil market (except China, which is remains a net energy importer only because of oil, so they have a strong strategic reason to reduce oil depdence, though they still use quite a bit[3]).
Btw I'm not citing these things because I'm a big supporter of hydrocarbons or against green energy (which will continue to grow with or without boosters, since there is a real demand for that energy), but more so a realist pointing out that we are absolutely not making any progress in reducing our global need for hydrocarbons.
0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-countr...
1. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324
2. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#/media/File:Chin...
Apart from PRC EV displacing 1mbd in oil. The other unmentioned stat PRC annual solar production, assume 30 year lifespan displaces about annual global oil consumption, i.e. 100mbd per day worth of oil. Their total solar output is 2x, what they produce, i.e. they produce enough solar to replace global oilm lng and a big chunk of coal in 10-15 years at full capacity. Storage hasn't caught up, true oil displacement depends on what storage lag will be, but likely short/medium term, not long term.
As for actual oil use, notice how PRC hammering EVs but still importing high % of oil, that's ongoing strategic reserver SPR and petchem play, i.e. even though they'll use less oil, they plan to store more (to mediate prices), and convert more into petchem products. So future is world where cheap renewables will displace oil from transportation to industr... because lots of energy = more industry = increase demand for fossil inputs. Which could mean less/same/more oil demand, unhelpful, I know.
Not very long ago not only was consumption increasing every year, it was increasing at an increasing rate every year. And that increasing rate was itself increasing not so much time before that. We've reversed the 3rd derivate, and we've reversed the 2nd derivative. If the 2nd derivative is negative for sufficient time, the 1st derivative will itself go negative. Looks like it'll happen this year, but the year's not over yet.
The first derivative is consumption. The 0th derivative is amount of carbon in the air. For that to go down would require a carbon negative economy which I don't have much hope for.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.
It won't get cheaper than solar though.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2025
(think in systems)
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
> Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
We could subsidize electric car purchases and manufacturing, both vehicles and batteries. We could allow excellent, affordable Chinese EVs into the US to force US domestic legacy auto to compete on quality and prices (instead of protecting their profits). We could remove fossil fuel subsidies (~$760B/annually in the US) and direct those resources to speed electrification, low carbon generation, storage, and transmission (as China is doing, and becoming the world's first electrostate). But we don't, and those who are upset about inflation should take it up with those squeezing them for profits. The US could've made better policy, it was a choice to regress towards supporting combustion vehicles to prioritize those profits. Elections have consequences. If one doesn't believe in climate change or using policy to encourage electrification while reducing the immense subsidies provided to fossil fuels, certainly, one might disagree with this. That's a mental model issue, not a data and facts issue.
Hopecore. Onward. The horrors persist, but so do we.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
https://web.archive.org/web/20260225073026/https://www.eia.g...
Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.
Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.
> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.
As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:
https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
*best is funny to define
The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.
I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.
Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.
I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
We need to pressure politicians to subsidize pump storage powerplants and massive transmission system upgrades (which means being ok with permitting new transmission lines) it's simply impossible to continue increasing the solar on the grid otherwise, we are rapidly approaching instability.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
That isn't a lot. New Mexico alone can fit about 100 Rhode Islands. And NM isn't even the largest thinly-populated sunny state in the union.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Wh...
If you dedicated a single (average sized) county per state to solar you'd ~3-5x the land you need for current consumption.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
He didn't say Elon was the origin.
A clusterfuck of priorities.
