Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
993 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
34987 readers
482 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is AN answer, but also not the only answer. Generating and moving power around is extremely complex and just seeing "Solar cheaper per Watt" and defining it as the best in all cases is silly. If you changed the axis to be size per MWh, then you would draw a totally different conclusion.
Solar still doesn't work at all night, no matter how cheap it gets.
It's not very useful for most of Northern Europe and birth America during the winter months. Even if it was free you'd still need alternatives.
Yup, and you're not going to be able to make enough batteries, and if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive.
There are other options for energy storage, but they all have massive caveats. We'll need something reliable as a backbone until we find a good way to store power.
This is the issue: you can use batteries to store energy for the night during the day. Batteries that store over longer periods such as long cloudy spells and large seasonal differences are too expensive. On the other hand, on a global scale this is really mostly a concern in Northern Europe (where I happen to live).
Even overnight storage is expensive.
But yes, it needs to work in both the summer and the winter, so anything not at the equator is going to have seasonal challenges. I'm excited about a lot of innovating battery proposals, such as stacking heavy boxes and hydrogen generation, but none of those are anywhere near capable of production scale. The massive gorilla in the room is using EV batteries during the night and recharging them during the day (the car would reserve enough for your morning commute), but that's largely theoretical and charging infrastructure is far from sufficient to make that work at scale (not to mention I don't think there are enough EVs). We have trouble making enough batteries to keep up with EV demand, so there's no hope of using conventional batteries to actually transition a large countries anytime soon.
So until we solve those problems, we need an energy backbone. Nuclear is a great option, especially if we can destigmatize it so construction can be cheaper. I live in an area that would be perfect for it (Utah USA, just stick it in the desert on the other side of the mountains), yet people keep blocking every proposal out of FUD. So a lot of our energy comes from coal and gas, and we sell a our excess to California, which is utterly stupid since we have geography that collects pollution and makes the air unhealthy to breathe.
Sweden represent :,(
Scotland has been meeting pretty much its entire energy demand with renewables for a good while now, because there are options other than solar, primarily wind
Renewables. Not solar.
8 years is a drop in the bucket when it comes to long term production.
It's really not even AN answer. It's so expensive to build them, requires hoards of highly specialised people to build and operate, takes decades to build all the while were relying on fossil fuels still until it can generate power, has a bigger carbon impact than renewables due to massive amounts of concrete used in building decommission and waste storage, is more expensive per mw, and while on average safer than most types of power plant, if something unexpected happens shit goes extremely bad.
It just has way way way too many downsides compared to wind or solar or basically any other renewable to the point its just not really worth pursuing.
I mean given that new nuclear plants haven't been made in quite some time it's too be expected that the average cost rises as costs for maintaining older plants also rises as they reach the end of their projected life cycle. In a few years when solar arrays have risen maintenance costs it won't change the fact that it's an essential power source, so the same logic should be applied to all clean energy.
With approaches to reducing emissions we should take a "yes and" approach. Yes nuclear is a way to reduce emissions and we need to invest in solar wind and hydro. This is true regardless of what we put at the front of that sentence!
UGH, YES, THANK YOU! Perfect should not be the enemy of good.