Despite What's Happening in the Usa, Renewables Are Winning Globally

Generating solar power in Mexico won't keep Iowans from warming their homes with natural gas and powering their F-150s with petroleum, so solar panels in Iowa are needed for the fight against AGW.

> Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW.

Absolutely not, Iowa is great for solar, it often provides more income than corn (and corn has massive subsidies), and is certainly better than most of Europe. Iowa really is not very far north

https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=44.374588,-77.81811,3

It also ignores the reason why corn biofuels exist, because we subsidize corn production for national security reasons and there's a ton of extra produced so they try and find profitable uses for it.

It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.

Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.

Can full scale solar make a dent in the land available in any country for food? And how does it compare to urban sprawl? (Although suburbs may have the benefit of solar on the roof powering the house below pretty well).

Another option is of course put the solar where you cant for whatever reason grow food. Hopefully there is enough shitty land to so that.

> Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country.

The Netherlands is entry 71 in a list of countries by population, making it very 'mid' indeed. You're comparing it to the USA, which is the third most populous nation on earth, of course it's significantly smaller!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

But hey, let's look at some better figures, estimated energy use is now in the region of 200TWh - https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin...

Which puts it somewhere around an Egypt or a Malaysia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

> If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.

That's a value judgement and you'll notice I've been careful not to put any into my comments.

True. Given their lifespan it behooves folks to "get them while they can".

A warlike country with a history of antagonism to China is probably less secure than countries that have chosen to behave like good neighbors.

If you feel like panel production is strategic, which is an easy argument to make, and given that the US has a substantial ability to produce panels [1], perhaps a useful strategy would be to consume those panels as much as possible, subsidizing production to make it a growth area.

Indeed it might become a surplus, allowing for export, which in turn improves foreign relations. And the simple existence of the domestic market leads to improvements, better quality and so on.

I'm no economist but the above seems like a solid strategy to me. It would be most interesting to see the outcomes where a country pursued this strategy versus one that actively worked to marginalize solar, killing domestic production instead.

I wonder if there are more countries in the same boat which could be used to see the long-term outcome of the various strategic options?

[1] Solar systems comprise of more than panels. But the other parts are just electronics so not important in the context of managing solar as a specific product.

Aren't panels commodotized? Many western countries could probably spin up production at scale if needed and economically viable. But why do so now?

Also why talk only about panels. Inverters are cost wise in the same order of magnitude, but much more complex artifacts.

>The same story plays out with virtually EVERY product that we in the West need.

That's not true. And China needs many Western products to keep their factories going.

Soon the grid will be just for backup

Yes, the grid votes into play. Especially for commercial solar installations. If I drop a 200Mw facility in a sunny area the grid needs updating to accept that 200Mw at that point.

Bit that's "boring" infrastructure. Cables, trenches, transformers. It can be done in "months" (perhaps a couple years) not decades.

For residential solar of course it's a non issue. The inverter caps the amount sent to the grid, and that cap is most often set to 0. (The 16% return I mentioned earlier is before feeding to the grid.)

This. Largest datacenters need gigawatt scale power now so they just go with gas turbines.

In the conventional sense, one-directional storage

Not to mention large chunks of it are from American companies cheating foreign tax systems. E.g. Amazon.

There was another HN thread recently where someone was commenting about how living conditions in specific parts of Europe were better than the US. When everyone questioned them, they explained that they just didn’t consider various parts of the EU or even certain large cities in major EU countries to be part of the comparison because everyone knew their living standards were lower.

It’s a strange double standard where the US gets evaluated as a mix of the worst headlines from every state, but when commenters talk about Europe being a utopia they actually refer to a cherry picked mix of the best parts of different countries.

The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent western European country does not come into daily contact with a poor resident of western Russia (except maybe through some recent drones...?). But in the US, it's hard to escape the poverty and violence unless you're closer to the top 1%. I am probably around top 20%, in an affluent part of an affluent coastal US city (but not Manhattan affluent). Still, I don't walk outside after dark because of the high crime rates. The crime rates are not as high as in the bad parts of the same city, but people are mugged on a daily basis, and even murders are uncomfortably frequent. I didn't have this problem when I lived in several different places in western Europe, which had lower incomes, but also much lower levels of violent crime. I will admit that American pay is better, but not sure about the quality of life.

> Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US).

I don't know where you learned statistics but this is like comically bad.

I suggest you pick an even smaller country like Andorra ~82K people and compare that with the top 82K people in the US.

Seriously, it's well known the US is skewed towards the top and it's actually a problem... We all remember how Warren Buffet had to say it was weird how he played a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary, right?

So your argument is that Countries:Countries is unfair, and that Europe should be inclusive of Russia, which isn't even an EU member state, and they are at war with by some metrics, for a proper like comparison?

Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela?

The failure of your argument is front and center, you basically admit that Germany has done well for itself, and so you label it "Elite". But that Elite nature is recent and fleeting, its based on what the government has been able to deliver its citizens. The same things that the US government has failed to deliver its own citizens.

We aren't just comparing regions of land, but polities. Otherwise its moot. I think the US can do better, and it can do better by improving the performance of its polity. Germans however cant exactly vote to directly improve Russian literacy.

If you include Western Russia, you can also include Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.

> even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS

Okay, I'll bite. During covid I got my three injections very easily. Currently you can get them for free if you are older/at-risk, or you can pay £100 to get them private, or your employer might pay for it as part of private insurance (as mine does)

What does the US do?

>Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes.

Also, screens on windows (to keep out mosquitoes and such) are almost ubiquitous in the US (even in government-funded housing for poor people, the disabled and the elderly) whereas many homes in Europe do not have them (even though Europe has mosquitoes that spread illnesses).

For consumer spending and disposable income, as for gdp per capita, averages are irrelevant as they can (and are) skewed by high earners/spenders and tell us little about the experience of the other 70% of the population.

Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe. Either because of climate or building standards (ie proper insulation and/or traditional building styles with a lot of thermal mass).

The size of housing is more due to limitations on development permits designed to limit urban sprawl, as well as differing traditions and preferences.

Having top universities is nice, but won’t help you if the rest of your education system sucks, because 99% of people do not visit the top universities.

Same with wealth and quality of life: the strength of a society is probably measured best by asking where you’d rather be poor, than where you’d rather be rich.

    "Europe is the continent that is warming most quickly, at twice the global average,” says Tomáš Janoš, ISGlobal and Recetox researcher and first author of the study.

> - Consumer spending;

> - Disposable income;

While it is undeniable that the US leads in these areas, it should be pointed out that the distribution of who spends and who has disposable income does matter. As in: if you and your 100 closest neighbors live in poverty, it matters very little if you have a multi-billionaire on the block who brings up the average disposable income.

> - Size of housing afforded;

Europe is a lot more densely populated than the US. You really should be comparing urban areas in both, or rural areas in both.

> - Top university rankings;

> - Research and development;

I'll grant you these.

> Europe suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the US. Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes. This causes real problems. In 2024, there were 62,700 Europeans who died from extreme heat, compared to ~3,000 Americans.

As others have pointed out: European homes tend to be much better insulated, and have much greater thermal mass, than American ones. Moreover, a far bigger percentage of the American population lives in warmer climates than in Europe.

That being said, the deaths from extreme heat do show that something needs to change here in order to meet the warming climate. And things are. The push for heat pumps in Europe also opens the door to running them as coolers when needed (when they're the air-to-air type).

You forgot the stuff that actually matters:

- Universal healthcare: I have never needed to pay for my medicine, and I can rest assured that my family won't go bankrupt if I ever get cancer or something.

- Extensive paid leave: I have 1.5 month of it every year.

- Retirement age: 62 years here (for now, at least).

- Public education: I have two masters from public schools, that I got essentially for free.

Americans suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the EU.

It may be the case that those are not the things people actually care about.

The point is that it’s as relevant to a conversation about photovoltaics as hydrogen is to a conversation about EVs.