[janmalec]

Solar energy has a place in the modern grid but some crucial information is missing from this commercial. Energy return on energy invested. When you calculate the amount of land, mined resources, labor, waste disposal issues and other resources needed to make the dream building a vast excess of solar, upgrading the grid to accommodate it and storing energy in hydrocarbons or even hydrogen, you begin to realize how far fetched this dream is.

The truth is usually somewhere in the middle. We will use the technologies described but when something sounds too good to be true, it is.

But the hype is huge. Hydrogen has much more people working on it in the EU Commission than nuclear despite nuclear being the biggest single electricity source in EU and hydrogen still in the prototype stage.

[Teever]

Solar and battery is bigger than you can tell from where you're looking.

Large cities in S.E. Asia are absolutely choking on smog, much of produced from shitty motor bikes and rickshaws. A shift to battery powered personal transportation with the batteries powered by local solar panels installed on buildings or walls or anywhere and everywhere they can stuff them can completely eliminate that pollution and completely eliminiate the need to import massive amounts of fuel.

The supply chain for the electricity can literally be like 200ft from the panels on a roof to the stand of motorbikes charging below. Compare that to trucks that have to drive miles to reload gas stations, or the maintenance costs of installing pipe infrastructure to transport it.

[psychoslave]

Sure on that regard and many others, this looks really great.

We still have long pipeline and centralized infrastructure for producing the panel themselves, with also its own environmental impact. I don't mean to lower the benefits of solar panel here, and other practical solutions we have under the hand clearly have at least as many negative impacts.

As other stated, we don't have yet a fabulous solution that allows to give every human the opportunity to blow and flourish with an abondance of energy that isn't generating pollution and large scale destruction of biodiversity. However the simple fact that such a goal is distinctively clear and considerable is already a big asset

[whazor]

Both solar and wind will create many periods of abundant electricity. This is happening. EU is betting on hydrogen as a strategy for dealing with this abundance. There is a hydrogen ladder [1], which describes the best opportunities currently known for hydrogen.

1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oZ3k6RCf8Y9YLKorogDeEB1Sp8n...

[janmalec]

They already create periods of abundant electricity, which is why we have negative prices. In practice this means you have to pay the producers for the electricity and then pay once more someone to take it and use it. This could be solved by removing the guaranteed purchasing price and dispatch priority, but then the entire solar economy becomes a lot different.

While periods of abundant electricity might seem like a good business opportunity, it turns out it is not easy to efficiently use huge amounts of electricity that come and go according to the weather. Most factories need to have reliable production to be economical.