Analysis Finds Anytime Electricity From Solar Available as Battery Costs Plummet
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But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.
If you want an Lithium power supply then the keyword to look for is "LFP".
Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.
But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.
In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.
And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.
I guess I've just been lucky.
But what might happen when they fail - thermal runaway is no joke with lithium-ion, ask any firefighter.
They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.
LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly
I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”
then you can move an and judge what't the panorama of closed/paywalled science found out there (Nature) that evaluates impacts of solar panel not even considering numbers of last batches of thrash from ~ 2010 (which still have 10-15 years till they start filling the world with chemicals like lead)... then may dive into electricity security and distribution and recycling technology to bring up a single ignorant phrase comment downsizing nuclear generation, despite it being safer and ecological on the long-term compared to photovoltaics for example
nuclear is more safe and has a small impact long-term than solar considering all the stuff and not just crude CO2 x Watts production. go read some papers. geopolitic ones too
And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.
In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
Similar effects can also be created in currently wild areas that does NOT disrupt the ecosystem, but augments it. For starters, in very dry areas which are ideal for solar deployment, the typical constraint on the ecosystem is lack of shade and moisture preservation, which is mitigated by solar deployment
There are also VAST areas of already populated or in-use areas that are ripe for deployment of solar panels, rooftops, parking areas, canals, reservoirs, and more, and ALL of them are a net improvement with solar panels
So, nobody is stripping anything from the earth, and there is no continuous transportation of materials to set them on fire. The fact that it is already CHEAPER to produce electricity by tearing down a coal plant and installing the same solar capacity shows how crazy it is.
Just because something was the best way we had to do something three technology generations ago does not mean it is still best, or even viable or recommended. Stunning to see such unscientific backwards attitudes on a site focused on science and technology.
https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e721...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2025/solar-panels-...
Certainly more so than, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine.
no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech oriented forum' probably don't even know that regulations and deals of these ballparks have a bunch of regulamentation that even looks for the security/reliability of the grid POV agaisnt terrorism and war...
they then bring a cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings being shaded by solar panels. we are chatting about mass production and distribution of energy. if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar only shows ignorancy from a multitude of fields... as if energy was easy as comparing output of CO2 per watt produced! they even were ironic agaisnt (underdeveloped) nuclear technology :D
Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you and find cites for everything).
So, start from the bottom:
>> thrash burried .. multi kilo tons wind turbines
not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)
>> visual pollution coming from wind turbines
Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything
>> transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision
Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.
>> they even were ironic agaisnt nuclear technology
Again, a strawman argument, as I never said I was against nuclear tech, and I am in fact for the new forms of nuclear tech, particularly the smaller even portable reactors ('tho the promise of Thorium reactors seems to have faded, but I'm not sure why).
>> if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar
Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.
>> cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings
tomatoes aren't the only thing being produced in conjunction with solar panels, and there are so many projects and studies showing its effectiveness in both improving results for farmers and improving their financial stability that it has a name: "agrivoltaics". Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.
>> security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war
If you want security and reliability, the best thing is widely dispersed power generation as close as possible to the use location. I have advocated for decades that a DOD project like the US Interstate Highway System should be done to ensure every household had a minimum amount of solar self-generation capacity, and stockpile transformers which have a manufacturing lead time of years. A nationwide grid outage without this is a potentially civilization-collapsing event, whereas if every household had some baseline capacity, they can still refrigerate food and communicate. Obviously just a cutout example, but the principle of diversity of power sources and locations makes a more robust system. Only bad grid planning makes solar or wind anything other than an improvement in grid reliability.
Moreover, battery tech is now sufficiently cheap that even the net cost of installing solar+batteries is lower than fossil plants, and that combination has better stability and millisecond-response rates that massively stabilize the grid (vs. ramp-up times measured in minutes-hours for gas plants and days for coal/nuclear).
>>a shame on a tech oriented forum
It is not the discussion of other options, but the disproportionate dismissal and spurious arguments that is a shame here. I'm sure there might be some exceptional situation where a new coal plant might actually be better all things considered, and if you have an actual example to discuss then bring some fats, but overall, that ship has sailed.
with agrivoataiagain, there are hundreds of article
it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic just because we can recycle 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256
> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything
so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the... ¶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1
> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.
... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we cut down the HIGH costs of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and are one of the worst offenders of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide?
> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.
seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene... ¶ https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul... ¶ https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...
> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.
i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested multi-million USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and completely blind on "green technology", which on this thread (not only you), seems much more about zombies falling from a green washing than anything else...
i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India
although de-centralization is always good!
They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.
Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179
Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988
PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.
Coal is so much worse in every coat metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705
Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.
Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.
Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.
Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.
Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)
Verb [back]
Object (anytime (electricity availability))
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)
In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.
(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).
But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.
Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.
https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure. And Germany did more failure than learning
Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?
Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay when they close a business?
> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.
Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.
Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).
e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...
Why would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their McMansions?
What happened to Blitzkrieg?
Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected and then flip a switch from third world country to superpower.
Damn my hot coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?
And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.
We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.
We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
Says who?
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/inflation-reduction-a...
Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.
As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.
It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.
Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.
It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.
Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.
That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?
Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?
He’s saying it as a realist.
China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.
Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...
Output in 2024 was 20 tons.
The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons.
I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at?
Oil hits hardest. I’m comparing financial sanctions to a battery embargo. Both are slow. Both are powerful.
Look dude, I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who find themselves motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.
> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.
China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).
Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.
In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.
There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)
This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.
Keep deluding yourself. The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration.
Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.
I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.
> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.
That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?
> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?
Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.
So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.
You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.
Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.
I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.
Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh
I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.
If I was in Japan, Taiwan, or the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway.
This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.
https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.
And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.
https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002
It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...
(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
But one effect of ever cheaper solar is that transmission costs start to dominate generation costs, because transmission is not getting cheaper.
Cheap solar and storage requires rethinking every aspect and all conventional wisdom about the grid. Storage in particular is a massive game changer on a scale that few in the industry understand.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
Depends on the country.
In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.
Solar PV on rooftops is great. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.
Always overwhelm the enemy when possible. Even when he's planning.
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air
^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode
I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.
I think you and I are saying the same thing though!
It's unfortunate that "efficiency" has both engineering and economic definitions.
So decentral is the current way to go.
That is the current state in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#/map/3
We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale
There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low, between 700 and 1000 GWh.
And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.
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