Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
LetsGetTechnicl · 1h ago
What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.
notTooFarGone · 1h ago
China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful.
Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.
China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
mensetmanusman · 35m ago
The oil industry pays 10s of billions in taxes.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
When the U.S. does it we're "picking sides".
destitude · 1h ago
I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.
piva00 · 1h ago
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
InitialLastName · 1h ago
I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).
bryanlarsen · 1h ago
I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.
ajross · 59m ago
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
pydry · 1h ago
It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
bryanlarsen · 53m ago
My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
pydry · 42m ago
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
aaomidi · 38m ago
US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA
mensetmanusman · 32m ago
Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.
If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.
ignoramous · 1h ago
> If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)
It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.
m348e912 · 1h ago
>How are people making these?
Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.
Biologist123 · 1h ago
This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
alex_duf · 53m ago
>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
Biologist123 · 38m ago
My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.
myrmidon · 9m ago
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
myrmidon · 28m ago
I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
Aardwolf · 1h ago
Given that life on earth in the last multi-billion years wasn't possible without the sun, it's strange to say that it has a moment only today
treve · 1h ago
It's a small joke.
peterpost2 · 2h ago
Paywall
gjm11 · 2h ago
For what it's worth, it didn't throw one up for me. Anyway, for anyone wondering what's beyond the slightly clickbaity headline, it isn't about some astronomical phenomenon; the subheading reads "In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system." and the article is all about that.
Brajeshwar · 1h ago
It do not throw up for me either. I was silently hoping that they excluded IPs from more economically behind countries, so we can read. I was happy.
ljf · 1h ago
No paywall for me here in the UK. Maybe they consider us an economically behind country too.
mikepurvis · 1h ago
Reader mode on FF and a reload dismissed it for me.
ryukoposting · 1h ago
> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!
IsTom · 1h ago
With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.
fragmede · 59m ago
Isn't that what biofuels are?
Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars
IsTom · 49m ago
EROI for them is really bad.
bryanlarsen · 1h ago
Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.
kccqzy · 39m ago
The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.
jama211 · 1h ago
The new yorker’s reporting has been really off recently
coldspoon95 · 1h ago
This advocates for a far inferior technology. It’s like advocating for dial up internet in the age of fiber and 5G.
It takes roughly 400kWh of energy to make a 1 sq-mtr of solar panels. And one can hope to get, at best 15x that over its life. And that’s being generous, without accounting for batteries to stabilize the grid at night. For reference, oil and gas return anywhere between 50-80x for the energy spent in drilling and distilling them.
Nuclear (boiling water or pressure water reactors) yield about 150-200x and are amazing as base loads. Next generation molten salt reactors (thorium based) yield over 1000x the energy spent in mining, refining, and bringing to critical. These reactors also burn about 98% of all fissile material, can consume nuclear waste, and yield isotopes for medical purposes. They work at atmospheric pressure(no risk of blowing up), and grid follow well as they work at 550degC which is great for energy conversion.
China achieved thorium reactor criticality in 2023 and is pouring large sums of money to scale this up. Whereas, we’re being primitive here despite creating the technology in Oak Ridge National Labs in the 80s.
Solar is a joke, and while it works for residential, I don’t understand how we assume it be the solution for true nation building.
China literally is making energy so cheap, farmers are installing air-conditioning for pig sheds to keep their bacons cool during the summer. Needless to say, cheap energy will power the next AI boom, and lift the poor and middle class up. And we’re toying with dumb tech like cavemen here.
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
drob518 · 1h ago
Modern nuclear reactors used to be huge, but that’s outdated now. The revolution in small modular reactors promises to change all that.
nashashmi · 1h ago
In capitalism, we innovate for more profit. We don’t innovate to get random people wealthy.
coldspoon95 · 1h ago
High EROI = high profit for investors
dgacmu · 1h ago
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
coldspoon95 · 1h ago
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
pydry · 1h ago
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
ljf · 1h ago
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
lotharcable · 1h ago
Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.
Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.
dgacmu · 1h ago
Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
coldspoon95 · 1h ago
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
kccqzy · 34m ago
And why is dynamic pricing a bad thing? It aligns the incentives well.
dgacmu · 13m ago
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
nemomarx · 1h ago
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
Kon5ole · 30m ago
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
lotharcable · 1h ago
> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
myrmidon · 55m ago
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
nemomarx · 1h ago
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
coldspoon95 · 1h ago
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
nemomarx · 59m ago
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
Dylan16807 · 1h ago
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
rz2k · 1h ago
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
omellet · 1h ago
You seem to be ignoring the most important factor, which is cost.
TSiege · 1h ago
You also only need to buy the panel once. Fuel is free
phtrivier · 1h ago
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
phtrivier · 26m ago
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
Barrin92 · 1h ago
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.
China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
Add archive.is in front of it
https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-...
If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.
If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.
It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.
Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!
Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars
It takes roughly 400kWh of energy to make a 1 sq-mtr of solar panels. And one can hope to get, at best 15x that over its life. And that’s being generous, without accounting for batteries to stabilize the grid at night. For reference, oil and gas return anywhere between 50-80x for the energy spent in drilling and distilling them.
Nuclear (boiling water or pressure water reactors) yield about 150-200x and are amazing as base loads. Next generation molten salt reactors (thorium based) yield over 1000x the energy spent in mining, refining, and bringing to critical. These reactors also burn about 98% of all fissile material, can consume nuclear waste, and yield isotopes for medical purposes. They work at atmospheric pressure(no risk of blowing up), and grid follow well as they work at 550degC which is great for energy conversion.
China achieved thorium reactor criticality in 2023 and is pouring large sums of money to scale this up. Whereas, we’re being primitive here despite creating the technology in Oak Ridge National Labs in the 80s.
Solar is a joke, and while it works for residential, I don’t understand how we assume it be the solution for true nation building.
China literally is making energy so cheap, farmers are installing air-conditioning for pig sheds to keep their bacons cool during the summer. Needless to say, cheap energy will power the next AI boom, and lift the poor and middle class up. And we’re toying with dumb tech like cavemen here.
And from a more recent study:
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1115957/old-new-...
[4] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.