Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026
electrek.co400 points by speckx 2 days ago
400 points by speckx 2 days ago
We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years.
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it.
Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
I agree. The momentum seems to be building up though, at least in (east) Europe, so there is a glimpse of hope.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
I live in Sweden and there is very heavy insulation, however it makes it unbearable at the end of the summer days (sunset around midnight). I am lucky my current place the bedrooms get the morning sun, not the afternoon sun like my old place.
In my old place I would often sleep in the living room sofa because of the heat.
Our place is more like your old place: all the bedrooms get the afternoon sun. We usually relied on having the blinders (external ones, electrically actuated) down, keeping the bedrooms dark until sunset (and using the external cool air at 7AM to cool the house for ~1.5 hours). It still doesn't solve the issue completely, the interior air temperature sometimes gets to 29-30 Celsius in the afternoon.
A bit on the toasty side. That was before we had solar installed, now we might as well get AC to use the sun to our advantage. On a personal note, I like the interior a bit warmer, somewhere around 24-25 Celsius.
Air conditioning is a substantial load on the grid and those that need it most are likely better suited to solar (more sun to heat, more sun to generate electricity). As you noted, it pays for itself and then is "free".
In a different timeline, we'd be investing in the country via zero/low-interest loans to encourage every homeowner to leverage this. It's a win for everybody.
On X/Twitter, I'm sometimes seeing graphs comparing energy usage per capita in the US vs the EU and China, with the narrative that the US is 'better' in some way because the higher energy usage.
And then there is stuff like the above indeed, uselessly wasting energy while things could be so much more efficient.
For years, maybe 20 now, I have seen a few people that seem reputable in terms of their positions and data they project that says that we should not have as many solar panels as we do. It is restrictions on rare materials etc. Some of them are probably paid to have this position, others seem genuine.
And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.
My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.
Limitless energy would likely bring more ecological gains in other areas. For example vertical indoor farming with artificial lights. If energy was free it is vertical farming would be massively cheaper than it is today.
Vertical indoor farming is far more sustainable than outdoors farming.
It would also push electrifying other types of transportation that is harder to electrify like airplanes and ships. For example, if energy is free flights in smaller electric planes with more connections would be far cheaper than getting direct flights in jets.
Free energy also means cheaper recycling, currently aluminium scrap gets shipped around the world to places that have cheap energy (like iceland with geothermal power) for recycling. With free energy you would be able to do it locally.
For the next decade, we should concentrate on building out grid-scale storage to soak up the surplus energy available when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Green hydrogen is the likely the next best use, as it will in turn enable things like direct reduction of steel.
If we get to the point where we can reliably expect 8-12 hours of free electricity 80% of the time, then things like Direct Air Capture of carbon become viable - but that's likely 25-30 years off, so who knows what other technologies will have appeared in the meantime.
>Vertical indoor farming is far more sustainable than outdoors farming.
It's not. "Vertical indoor farming" is heavily biomass constrained and this won't change even with infinite energy.
Have you ever paid attention to the types of crops grown in vertical farms? "Leafy greens" is a phrase that is used almost exclusively in the context of vertical farms and nowhere else. Most people talk about the specific vegetables they've had in their salad, not a broad category of vegetables that can be used for salads.
"Leafy greens" are "interesting", because they have an incredibly high water content, meaning less biomass is needed to produce the same volume of produce and they tend to have small root networks, which means that most of the biomass is edible and can be sold. They also tend to be small in the vertical direction, which allows more vertical stacking.
this is indeed a flaw in modern societies, we get lost in technological "progress" and become blind and dumb
Nice. In the US, it cost us $35k to install 7.6 kW panels + 13 kWh battery. But our PG&E electricity prices in the Bay Area are also several times more expensive than in Europe ($0.50 per kWh) so it will also pay off in 8-10 years.
$35k and $0.50 per kWh is quite pricy. My brother is in US (Kansas) and he told me that for the time being, it doesn't make sense for him to get solar, as the utility price is something like $0.07/kWh and he uses a low amount of electricity and install cost would be somewhere around $20k-25k. I think the math works?
We also did the math for ourselves with 8-10 years at current electricity prices: 30 eurocents/kWh (which got 3x more expensive in the last 10 years). So we might be lucky and break even even sooner.
Curious, when you calculate 8-10yr payoff, are you taking into account the last 10-20 year kwh cost inflation trend as well?
Plus $15k to move them for new shingles when the time comes, if they’re on shingles.
I wonder why we don’t use them to build shade structures instead.
!35K, I just payed $11K for the same in Europe. But here in Spain it is not financially worth it, but insurers against frequent brownouts and 3 outages a year
11k euro is INSANELY cheap?
Afaik there is absolutely no way to the same thing legally here in Sweden. Unless prices have really fallen off a cliff.
Yes, indeed, once I saw the math/price, it seemed like a no-brainer to just install it. Anedoctal, of course, the rumour is a few (small-ish) companies here offer their complete services abroad in EU (at least to Germany to my knowledge), which makes it very cheap to install, but I did not interact with said companies.
I have friends in Germany and their solar (similar to ours, no batteries) installation cost more than double. At the time, it seemed expensive and out of reach...
EDIT: forgot to mention that there is a big solar installation boom here, our godfather has a small company which just installed two solar parks and waits for them to go into operation (which is harder than it sounds, due to bureaucracy).
EDIT 2: Just for fun, I've calculated todays price (retail price at the time of writing this) using Romanian prices:
- 22 solar panels (460w): 434.39 RON/panel [1]
- 8kW hybrid inverter: 4873 RON [2]
- 2 16kWh batteries: 17576 RON [3]
Total is 32009 RON, that is (at current exchange rate) 6088EUR. The rest is service (planning/execution), warranty and so on.
[1]: https://depozitsolar.ro/canadian-solar-4/canadian-solar-toph...
[2]: https://ecobatenergy.ro/invertor-deye-hibrid-sun-8k-sg05lp1-...
[3]: https://ecobatenergy.ro/acumulator-renon-lifepo4-xcellent-pl...
I just upgraded the solar system at my family's off-grid cabin. It's incredible how much battery technology has improved over the last 10 years.
Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.
Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)
I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.
The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often?
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
Generating hydrocarbons at home from their air with excess electricity is like the ultimate endgame in my opinion. It’d be so sick and enable a million new possibilities, essentially getting us into a net-zero emissions state without needing to use batteries for everything.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
I often daydream about electrolysing water to generate oxygen and hydrogen and store them to use for heating and like welding torches and stuff.
To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
>To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
Or a hydrogen fuel cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
The round-trip efficiency is of course abysmal compared to batteries, but if the input energy is "free", the increased density could pay off.
Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?
I just did an install to add solar and batteries to my shed to power lights and an AC. It was pretty easy. Hardest part was flattening the ground since I did a ground mount system. 5kw panels and 5kwh of batteries. $1000 for the panels, and $1,400 for the battery and inverter. $250 for the ground mount. Plus a bunch of miscellaneous expenses (tools, wires, permits, etc). It would be cheaper if I did it again since batteries and inverters seem to get cheaper every 6 months.
Check out https://m.youtube.com/c/WillProwse and https://diysolarforum.com/
I'm just getting into Solar myself and while it seems like a lot there are some things that you have to do math for. If you've got 10 panels you'll want to find out how to get all that energy to the inverter/mppt without going over the volt/amp limit on the device. This is probably the most difficult part and for everything else there's a huge solar community of people starting exactly where you are. I myself just bought an Anker solar battery and 2 panels that I bring out during the day to charge the battery and it runs my laptop and monitor for the evening after I get home from work. I want to do more but I'm renting so I'm just trying to find ways to do so. When my state legalizes balcony solar you bet I'm going to play with that too.
Its not difficult, you just have to change the configuration of your panels between in series and parallel.
Ideally you dont buy the all in one batteries as they usually have anemic solar inputs.
> without going over the volt/amp limit on the device.
It’s not clear what device you’re referring to in this context.
The MPPT solar controller.
MidNite has a sizing tool for this: https://www.midnitesolar.com/sizingTool/
So the most difficult part is using a calculator to determine the charge controller capacity.
No, you also need to calculate the voltage drop over your distance to show to minimum wire sizing, and the voltage and power levels at the ASHRAE minimum temperature, the current level at 156.25% over the wiring at the ASHRAE max temperature to compute the temperature adjusted resistance and show that your wiring meets minimum spec, etc.
It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.
Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).
So the most difficult part is using domain specific online calculators to determine the wiring requirements and charge controller capacity.
The most difficult part is acquiring the necessary domain specific knowledge, including what your AHJ changed from the national codes. But yes, once you know everything it’s all pretty straightforward stuff.
No, just figure out how much solar you want and buy and accordingly sized charge controller/MPPT.
They will all tell you maximum input volts and amperage. You can calculate watts by multiplying those two and just need to wire your panels in a way that doesn't exceed either value.
It's fairly easy and there are a lot of forums around with knowledgeable people.
My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series.
However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I don't need to deal with any grid-tie circuitry, which would make it much more difficult and I'd definitely get an electrician for that.
Modern off-road/off-grid inverter chargers make wiring to the network pretty easy. I'd still recommend an electrician, but most they'd likely need to do is wire the grid into the inverter-charger input, and your cabin to the output, and check whatever protection (like RCDs) your cabin has is sufficient/up-to-date.
I don't have solar myself but I worked for a solar tech company for a couple of years
I think the biggest gotcha we dealt with was that you can't (or shouldn't) just wire solar into your house and call it a day. You have to let your electrical company know, there are permits and inspections that need to be done before you wire your solar into the public grid. There may also be some relevant bylaws you should know about, or if you live in an HOA you should check their policy first so you don't start a fight.
It's like a lot of things. Conceptually easy, but bureaucracy makes it complicated
Alternatively, in Australia at least, "bureaucracy" streamlines the issues and at various times and locations offers rebates and schemes to reduce significant upfront costs and fold those into payments over time included in bills.
Globally, this of course varies.
I 100% agree with having inspections if you're grid tied. You don't want your system energizing the neighbourhood when the power goes out!
For most purposes, I would avoid the shunt and use a current transformer (for AC) or a DC current sensor (conceptually the same thing but with a Hall effect sensor or other mechanism that works for DC). This way you don’t need anything to touch the potentially rather large voltages on a solar array.
The OP mentioned modern battery technologies - generally the shunt sits between an LFP battery negative and the main circuit negative/ground, and the solar panels connect to MPPTs. So the voltage at the shunt is a nice consistent nominal 12.8V (~13.3V in practice) or a multiple thereof (for series battery setups).
I just upgraded our hybrid caravan to 24V LFP (2x 300Ah 12V), roof solar + extra MPPT for external solar, shunt, inverter-charger, 24V->12V converter for existing circuity (lights, pump, etc), DCDC charger from car, battery balancer, a little touchscreen interface inside (all victron gear with renogy batteries). It was as a lot of fun and it's amazing how much power we have off grid now! The system would work excellent for a little cabin exactly how it is (minus DCDC).
Or an esp32 to not run Linux and whatnot off of an sd card. Should be more reliable in the long run
Where is the cabin? Roughly speaking of course
The "Sunshine" Coast of BC.
Right now we're limited by the charging capacity of the inverter/charger. It can only do 50A in from an external solar controller. In hindsight I should have gone with a 48V inverter/charger to get twice the power going in. On a sunny day we're maxing it out at 1200W for several hours at a time.
Hi, from the other coast. I wish I had solar maybe someday. Do you ever watch Artisan Electric from the UK? He tried to run his shop on 100% solar+battery. He ran into a problem where sunny day batteries full shop using power but the panels themselves were throttling. They had no where to send the extra power. He bought a bitcoin floor heater (lol), charged EVs, and some other stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evkdqTcMbWM
Yeah that's the point. Most systems are over producing on peak hours of peak days so they can average out to enough power on lower light days. You can buy more batteries, but if you don't have batteries it's waste.
I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.
Most places have a very different mix of electricity sources, things like hydro and imports from places further to the east (where the sun is still shinning) or wind from west-ward. Nuclear provides the same base power all around the day, etc.
The need for peaker plants to offset the need for batteries is greatly exaggerated. The batteries are mostly required for grid frequency stabilization due to renewal intermittence (clouds passing through, wind slowing down), not so much for overnight storage in most locations.
Of course this varies drastically from place to place, Hawaii for example can't really import energy production from other places.
Batteries in California have curtailed the need for peaker plants most of the year. Natural gas is starting to become a seasonal supply of electricity. Fall winter spring it's providing a few GW of power. Only in the mid to late summer does it break 10GW. That change happened over just five years.
I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.
Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.
I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost. That's why the monetary payoff time for installing solar is non-zero. Versus a backup generator you're paying 2-3x the cost upfront. And yes we know the running cost is almost 0, the maintenance is almost nothing, etc etc, but I could see that argument not holding as much water as we need it to.
The adoption rate in places like Australia and even Texas is what demonstrates that the argument holds water.
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
They paid to decommission fossils early, and amortized it over the future. So it's going to drop like a rock once those debts are paid and the last plants shut down, with fewer remaining customers and lighter load on the grid. But until then, consumers will be paying higher bills.
Similar to the UK - See item 18. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/141240/html...
That is not what your link says?
Perhaps they did not mean point 18, but I found it interesting anyway.
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
> How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
Transmission costs.
Loans transfer upfront costs into operating costs, thus making upfront costs largely meaningless for anyone with access to cheap credit.
Solar also has incredibly low upfront costs: 400W panels are available for less than $100 / each these days.
Are you talking backup generator vs solar for a home?
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
It's kinda an apples/oranges comparison
> I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost.
Why do you say this?
Because you said it's the cheapest by far but didn't say "after X years". Did I miss where you acknowledged there's a crossover point in cost?
Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
That is not entirely correct. Typically you will see LCOE for Solar grouped with the LCOE of Solar and energy storage.
EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
> and energy storage
What do you think this means? It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Quoting LCOE and ignoring system costs disqualifies you for any discussion on this topic, sorry.
I recommend this video from YouTuber Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
> then you burn it and it's gone.
It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.
Accountants call them 'externalities'. Things they can take off the books if they treat the atmosphere like an open air sewer system.
Is this the version he reuploaded? I saw it the day he posted it, and I have never seen that man more passionate and awesome. He mentioned later that he toned it down, which is almost a bummer!
If this is the video I'm thinking of, both versions are up. I think the toned down version is meant to be more palatable to certain people.
The one above is the public long version. it has a link to this unlisted short version
Correct - the version I linked is his more aggressive version, but he does give a soft out with 30 minutes remaining. He mentions that he has also uploaded the alternative version for those who want to share it with someone who wouldn't enjoy the ending of this version.
I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
> Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions?
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.
Finland:
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...
They are buying electricity and storing it as heat and time-arbitrage it to when the heat is needed, they make no mention of the electric power source. In any case, during the depth of winter, when it's needed most, they're still burning carbon. Previous paragraph to your quote:
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
going from burning fuel 12 months of the year to 3 is still a 75% cut in fuel costs and emissions
Finland only started building solar recently. Wind is still more cost-effective, if you only consider the cost of generation. But there is almost too much installed wind capacity. If you also consider the value of the generated energy, solar gets ahead, as it correlates less with existing generation.
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.
> That's for 5000 people.
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize
It scales up just the way that siloes on farms scale up ... you build more of them.
And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.
That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.
Not necessarily. A large component for solar+storage is using the storage to offset the time that the energy is available. It's not just storing for overproduction
For instance, most places will have peak energy usage in the evening, when everyone gets home from work, starts the laundry, turns up the thermostat and makes dinner and such, kind of all at the same time
If you can store the solar energy at noon and use it at 6pm when everyone has come home from work and started making dinner, then you can prevent a demand peak from ramping up fossil fuel plant
So you aren't necessarily just aiming to store the overproduction, you're using the stored solar when it's more useful
Usually there's either sun or wind. Last year 57% of Finland's electricity generation was from renewables, the rest being largely nuclear, and the electricity costs were among lowest in Europe.
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
The argument I have generally heard is consistent power output and grid availability 24x7 with solar is harder. So they augment with gas turbines. IMO augmenting it with nuclear is better.
Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.
And even better is to augment it with large scale batteries.
Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.
Why not just nuclear?
Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.
Why not just gas?
Because it’s too expensive.
>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
>If power generation isn't profitable
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
You can be when you are living in an apartment building and you hear how people who have a house get 0 electric bill or get negative electric bill.
Some people just want the world to burn…
It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.
There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.
> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
solar heating isnt as passive, and requires that the fluid keeps flowing, and all thr plumbing maintenance that goes with that.
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
This is an important point. In the 1980's, PV panels extracted 5-10% of the incident solar energy which could be converted to heat at roughly 100% efficiency. Solar thermal collectors collected at 80+% efficiency and could store and return the heat at about that level for a net 70% round trip. That's a lot better than PV, especially if the collector is your entire south-facing facade.
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Inertia was an issue, now it's solved with grid-forming batteries that can provide the same inertia a rotating flywheel did.
Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_
And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5
The inertia issue is not some fundamental law of physics, it's just how the DC->AC inverters are commonly programmed, to follow the grid, since that is the easiest way to regulate the grid when non-AC generation is a minority.
The inverters can instead be programmed to form the grid frequency - Australia installed its big battery literally as a much faster way to stabilize grid instability events than spinning up gas peaker plants.
Grids with large amounts of renewables like California are moving toward VPPs (Virtual Power Plants) which are distributed collections of renewables and batteries which are programmed to work in unison to help form the grid, as an easier way to regulate the grid frequency than coordinating each tiny plant separately.
I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.
That and the excess amount of farming just to feed cows for beef.
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.
The solar farm powering BEVs also uses maybe 1/200th the area of the equivalent bioethanol farm powering ICVs.
Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.
You need to read about agrivoltaics. This is being used to huge effect elsewhere in the world to improve farming & soil. Here's an example from China:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
This guide to the UK’s Land Use Framework says that the amount of land required for renewables by 2050 is comparable to the amount of land used by golf courses.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...
Also see the amount of land used for beef and dairy. Before industrial farming, Britain was a rainforest.
Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.
And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.
> And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
Or under the plume of heavy metals from coal. That land, near the transmission infrastructure of a coal plant, is only good for solar farms.
Also, when you’re done with the solar farm you simply take the panels off, disassemble the aluminium frame, then you have your field back. Unlike a coal mine.
> use up perfectly usable farmland
It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.
> A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
on that easy fix - the land under solar panels can still be used for farming or ranching
What do you have against farmers using their land as they see fit? Are you against property rights? What other freedoms do you oppose?
were you crying when you considered the myriad of negative effects of burning fossil fuels?
If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.
Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.
Maybe I’m too optimistic :)
Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
As someone in New England: We don't have enough gas infrastructure up here either, you can't just add more gas plants to our grid and accomplish anything.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
Every kWh your panels make from sunlight that you use immediately (or store "behind the meter"), you don't have to buy from the grid.
And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Residential solar doesn't make that much sense from a system point of view - it's a lot more expensive than utility grade solar for the same amount of energy, but with the way the energy market works retail electricity prices are much higher than wholesale prices and that makes the upside of rooftop solar a lot bigger for consumers.
"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.
It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will be using to convince people otherwise:
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
In fact, it's very easy to reason them to change their minds:
1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span
2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics
3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users
4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent
We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
I do not think the two should be lumped together. They do both need storage but solar is more predictable. Winds can be low for extended periods.
We can analyze this issue with historical weather data, and it turns out it's tractable. Using solar + wind + batteries + non-fossil fuel turbines enables 365/24/7 "synthetic baseload", 100% renewable.
See https://model.energy/ for a web site that will solve this optimization problem for you in various places.
> Winds can be low for extended periods.
So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.
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Can you point to large scale solar or wind projects that were shoved into places that have extended periods of low sunlight or wind?
The entire Energiewende for example.
Are you saying that they chose bad locations inside of Germany for wind and solar or that Germany doesn't have any viable locations and they shouldn't build wind and solar in Germany at all?
germany is producing tons of solar energy though?
can you be more specific and give 10 examples of german solar plants that produce ~0W electricity in a year?
they might be a lot more productive than you think
Germany is producing some solar energy. This is of course indisputable.
They paid for that by selling most of their industry to China because energy costs became unbearable.
Was this the right tradeoff?
Without that solar / wind, Europe would be paying 100 million euros per day more for LNG. Electricity in Europe is expensive enough already, making it even more expensive by shunning the cheapest available form would be even harder on industry.