It's aluminum, glass, silicon, and some conductive metal. Surely you all have those materials.
And even if you don't make them yourselves, they aren't make and then burn like fossil fuels, they are durable infrastructure, you don't have to replace them often - they have an expected lifespan of >30 years. Buy as many as China will sell you, and once you have more than enough installed, you're good for a long time, regardless of whether they cut you off.
I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long, it's a bit tricky to mindset shift that once these things are installed, you're just good. And they're super fungible, you don't need any precision replacement parts, so you can make your own replacement parts if you want.
Yes, and France currently has a huge problem with keeping their plants online in the summer when it's too warm. And building new plants is outrageously expensive, see Hinkley Point C. Oh, ans you still need to import fission material, so you're dependent again on other countries. Nuclear was good in the 70s, now it's beaten thoroughly by renewables.
The Swedish government is very pro renewables, yet it is initiating large investments in nuclear because they believe it is the only way to ensure enough electricity for the larger and larger need for it in the near future. I’d say they have some good information to base that decision on, since you’re right it’s really expensive, but also it’s the only way to get large amounts of production when the sun ain’t shining (all winter here) and there’s no wind (also happens a lot in the colder months).
Right, a mix of uncorrelated sources is much more resilient than 100% renewables. Of the cleantech industry people I listen to, none of them are advocating for 100% renewables, you need a mix for grid reliability. But renewables can take on much of the load. And overpaneling can help significantly, and makes a lot more sense now that solar is super cheap.
Most panels have a 25 year 80% production warranty. Unless they're planning on being out of business, they're not planning on them lasting <25 years. So their useful life is significantly longer than 30 years, unless we come up with massively more efficient panels and the land opportunity cost is high enough that we should swap them out rather than let them just keep pumping out electricity.
I don't know about others but personally I'd like my electricity source to not be constantly degrading over time and requiring maintenance crews to go out and replace the panels as they randomly start falling below the required efficiency levels. I'd prefer if the entire production unit was a single all-inclusive compound maintained by the team on site, with a relatively compact ecological footprint.
Your comment makes no sense. If the Middle Eat oil gets cut off, you're suffering within days. If China cuts off solar panels, you have many plenty of time to find an alternative source or ramp up your own production.
If you chase down all inputs into everything you need to generate power you will find you're not truly independent from anyone. But solar panels and various other renewables hardware is much easier to stockpile than oil.
> but there is nothing inevitable about it
The Middle East is not going back to normal any time soon. The Israeli/US attack on Iran is a strategic catastrophe, implemented by two felons advised by ideologues and incompetents. The conditions are right to make oil more expensive for a long time, regardless of the outcome of the war. True peace is very unlikely to never be achieved. For instance: Iran now has a massive incentive to build nukes.
Meanwhile solar panel, wind farm, and battery prices are dropping like a rock and they avoid all of the problems of oil. Only the most ideologically fixated wouldn't invest in and install renewables. Anything that makes huge amounts of money is indeed inevitable.
But at the moments they cover only a tiny percentage of our electricity needs, not even talking about storage or the heating needs which usually come from gas.
Huge difference between tranistioning to renewables and going completely de-centralised. Even if we put a limit to the latter at the community level, it's a recipe for de-industrialisation. Centralised power production, even with renewables, has economies of scale, and those economies amplify with volatile demand sources, e.g. residences.
You can decentralize residential power without doing the same for industrial loads. Doing so is a mixed bag. It's somewhat more expensive however it's less prone to failures during natural disasters, failures aren't outside of your ability to fix, and it isn't subject to politics to nearly the same degree.
When you consider the logistics of strengthening the last mile of residential to accommodate EVs in a sparsely populated place like the US (or rather the apparent lack of political will to do so) it starts to look extremely attractive.
A good friend of mine is a solar installer in rural California, and he is booked solid building battery and solar systems sized to charge cars, because depending on PG&E is worse than spending the money to go off-grid.
Yepp. Grid defection is a trend all across the world right now in sunny climates. I live in Germany and can unfortunately not do this, but if I had thr sun hours of California, you can bet I'd build 300kWh of LiFePO4 and as much solar as my roof allows, and cancel all my expensive contracts.
> You can decentralize residential power without doing the same for industrial loads. Doing so is a mixed bag
There is a middle ground: decentralize enough to run essential services. Run the rest through the grid. The big downside to decentralising residential power is that's variable demand–precisely the sort of demand you can net out against other parts of the grid. The sort of variance that makes grids more economic than everyone powering themselves.
> The big downside to decentralising residential power is that's variable demand–precisely the sort of demand you can net out against other parts of the grid.
Residential is variable but for the most part not all that amenable to time shifting, at least at present. Isn't a grid most efficient with a constant load, with the next best being something that varies only slowly over time and is highly predictable?
Then there's EVs. I'm under the impression that replacing a notable fraction of the ICE cars on the road with EVs would at present place the grid over capacity most places in the US.
When it comes to unit cost doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook? I don't see why residential considerations should make much (or even any) difference to dense commercial or extremely high capacity industrial users. Given that solar plus battery is reasonably affordable for a large chunk of the US population it doesn't really seem like much of a downside when framed as a voluntary expense. I still see people building it out where I'm at (suburbs) despite (AFAIK) the subsidies ending.
That’s fine. A solar system specced to a house has to meet its max drawdown. A house connected to a grid can effectively pawn off its unused power to another user. That’s the efficiency of a grid.
> doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook?
Yes. The NPV of a blended system (solar, maybe battery and grid) almost always beats going all in on one or the other. You spec to your base load and put the uncertainty on the grid. That way you don’t have to overprovision solar and battery. (And you’re good with your essentials if the power goes out.)
This is almost universally true unless you have super-subsidized solar (bonus points for an expensive grid, e.g. California) or stupidly-cheap and reliable grid power (until recently, the Gulf).
I'm fairly certain securing one's household's access to energy independent of rate increases triggered by a combination of aging infrastructure and data center power demand doesn't have a lot in common with tech bros attempts at reinventing trains badly from first principles but I'm open to hear the argument. Care to unpack that?
Easily: it's techbros again forgetting that an expensive asset only wealthy can afford isn't a solution to a mass scale infrastructure problem. And again, just like with Tesla bros, nothing about household solar is independent and requires infrastructure to support it - which, just like with trains, isn't going to get required investment because you're dreaming about individual investment.
Like you say, I want trains - proper infrastructure supported renewables, not Teslas - home individual infra only affordable by wealthy individuals at the cost of shared infrastructure while lowering resilience because it still uses shared infrastructure.
I didn't downvote them, and I don't really disagree with them (that much). But I do disagree with the idea that what they're saying is "something so obvious".
I think the evidence is overwhelming that renewables plus storage will provide the bulk of our energy needs, or at least electricity needs, in the very near future. But I think the idea that it will be some sort of libertarian/individualistic utopia if we're all generating our own power and living off grid is a fallacy. This sort of widespread "off grid" living (beyond a small number of ideologues/enthusiasts) is what you only see essentially in failed states, where communal services are unreliable and the social contract is so frayed that people need to inefficiently generate their own power. One can argue the US and other Western countries are headed that way, but I don't think that's "obvious" or necessarily a good thing.
A much more "obvious" solution IMO is to invest in efficient, grid-scale renewable generation combined with robust storage tiers, as well us long overdue updates to the grid.
And to emphasize, because I'm sure it will get lost in translation, I'm in no way saying people shouldn't be self-sufficient or install rooftop solar if they want to. What I am saying is that widespread rooftop solar as the "of course that's the right answer" endgame of renewables deployment is in no way obvious, inevitable or even desirable.
> A much more "obvious" solution IMO is to invest in efficient, grid-scale renewable generation combined with robust storage tiers, as well us long overdue updates to the grid.
Individual rooftop solar + home batteries _is_ how we're doing this in Australia. You can connect your home setup directly to the wholesale grid and import/export electricity at appropriate times.
