[Kon5ole]

Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy. It starts to produce electricity basically the same day.

I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.

[danmaz74]

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

[reactordev]

This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide.

The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…

If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.

[evolve2k]

Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property.

Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you.

There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens.

I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.

Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change.

As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.

[jillesvangurp]

You are not wrong.

The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.

That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.

The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.

Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.

[Fronzie]

(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.

[consp]

We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.

[ViewTrick1002]

Storage exists? Now down to $50/kWh.

Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.

[GrowingSideways]

Well as we all know the political will in this country seems to generally be "let's all commit suicide together", but perhaps mass installations of solar will provide material reason to improve conditions somewhat.

[infecto]

The bigger issue, at least in the US, is that there is a huge lack of supply in the equipment to connect to the grid at the moment. Backlogs are still 1-3 years after order, not terrible but still an issue deploying.

[taminka]

i wonder if ppl's electricity consumption habits will change in response to this, idk like turning the heat way up during the day or using high power appliances more during the day

[yunohn]

So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?

[zahlman]

> Solar can be deployed... with almost no bureaucracy.

It can be.

Unless existing bureaucracy doesn't want that.

[chiefalchemist]

Yes, great feature. Unfortunately, to the status quo, it's a bug.

[Saline9515]

Solar can't produce electricity at night, it's hardly a a credible sole competitor if the power surge requires a constant power supply. Renewables are most of the time coupled with gas power plants to handle this.

[polyterative]

You don't need solar to be 100% perfect to be useful

[LightBug1]

It's really a shame, a damned shame, that we haven't invented batteries yet.

[graemep]

Combined with batteries it is also very resilient

[api]

A lot of the opposition to it is vibes based at this point.

Big industrial projects. Big power plants. Big finance. Real men.

It’s silly. If you want a real men trip get into body building and MMA or something and use solar power.

[exabrial]

It’s too bad solar degrades over time. I think it’d be more of a no-brainer if we could actually manufacture it at scale domestically without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.

[nicoburns]

> It’s too bad solar degrades over time... without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.

Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.

Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.

[gruez]

>without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.

Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.

[gitaarik]

After 15 years you can just replace them