It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
Up to the 2008 election the Republican party platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy (with specific mentions of solar and wind), more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient.
They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, giving examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and developing more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars.
They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.
All that was gone by 2012. I'm not sure what caused the change.
Fracking. Before fracking people were worried about "peak oil", and being dependent on unfriendly governments for our basic energy needs. Then with fracking we realized we are actually sitting on huge available oil reserves, and peak oil quickly became a quaint outdated concept.
Not that it changes your point, but the other day I met a republican who said he doesn’t think climate change is a thing but peak oil, now that’s something to worry about.
The longevity of this plus the “no anthropogenic climate change” nonsense is astounding. Armchair climate sceptics are happy to seriously stick to talking points that are so out of date that even the oil industry doesn’t use them anymore.
So you met a person, they told you their Party Affiliation, then went to tell you how it isn't "real".
Sorry I don't believe your paraphrasing of this person's real thoughts and ideas. I'm sure these people exist, but it doesn't mean anything. I could equally go find someone crazy saying the world is going to end this year.
That may be part of it, but as your parent comment mentioned, the Republicans weren't only worried about peak oil and being dependent on unfriendly governments, but also about climate change. Of course, none of these three problems went away, the point where fossil fuels will be exhausted just got pushed further into the future, and the fact that it will take more and more effort and environmental damage to get to the remaining resources is also undeniable.
But yeah, I guess your answer still applies indirectly: Fracking -> stronger interests by US oil companies -> money to the Republican party -> fossil fuel friendly regulations.
Fracking has nothing to do with energy. When you look at EROI oil from a gusher is around ~100:1. For solar 10-25:1, wind 20-50:1, Fracking is 10:1 and most of that doesn't end up as diesel
It's useful for the plastics and petrochemical industry, but it's not going to make the country energy independent, even including battery costs wind still trounces.
Obama was elected, which made some people very angry:
> Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
> Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Sure Trump took everything to an absurd level of "do the opposite of biden no matter what", but it started back then.
> The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
I remember that day vividly.
It was the middle of the Great Recession, it was the worst our economy was doing in a long time. Millions were out of work. People were looking to the government to see what the plan was to get the country back on track.
A reporter asks McConnell what the senate’s number one priority was.
The answer? Not fixing the economy, not helping out every day Americans. Not finding the root cause of the crash and making sure it doesn’t happen that way again.
No, the answer was “make sure Obama is a one term president.” That’s all we would expect from the senate for the next 6 years.
The day McConnell said that, I said out loud: “I will never vote Republican again for the rest of my life.” (Prior to that point I mostly voted D but not 100% of the time.)
In 2008-9 Republicans did not even make the pretense of Obama being a threat to democracy. (Which would have been absurd in a way it isn't for Trump, who tried to overthrow an election he lost.)
I remember when some lady called Obama "Muslim" (in the same tone of voice as she'd say "demon" or something) and Mitt Romney took the microphone from her and said "no, no, we disagree politically but he's a good man."
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
I recommend John Boehner's book. He complimented Obama often, stated he & his team were far more ready than McCain to work with Bush on the economy. They were smoking buddies.
Didn’t help that he showed up at his first couple Senate meetings gloating about winning the election. And tried to set working hours for his former colleagues. Among other things.
Obstructionism as a core tenet of the (former) Republican platform is reprehensible, and retrospectively probably led to quite a bit of discontent with the government’s inability to address problems that Americans face. That same discontent fomented the current reactionary swing, so in the end maybe they really got what they wanted. Shameful.
Right on. That's probably the worst part of the debilitating self-own we're currently going through. Even if conservatives (aka Democrats) gain back Congress, then gain back the Presidency, then overcome their controlled opposition dynamic where enough inevitably defect and undermine anything meaningful from getting done, so much has been broken that we will be lucky if they even manage to stop the hemorrhaging. Even if the Republicans that got "dragged into" the fascist fever start to have a bit of self-reflection to realize the damage they've done. We've got what, maybe 8 years until the malcontents' dog whistle refrains start to have credence again and then we're right back to staring down the destructionists - with a trail having already been blazed.
"Other things" most obviously being the racism caused in part by significant cognitive dissonance that uniquely affects white supremacists when having a black president.
In a word: Greed. In two words: Crony Capitalism. The spend on “non-renewable“ energy is significant to the domestic economy. In 2023 (most recent year I could find), consumer spend on energy in the US was $1.6T (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener...) with at least 82% of that being fossil fuels - the remainder being “renewables” and nuclear energy (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444). This does not include billions in subsidies and infrastructure investment.
“Going green” would threaten the American Greed Machine by cutting upwards of $150B in taxes annually, interfering with the individual, corporate, and government gains from the stock and commodities markets, causing short-term inflation due to commodity value spikes, and long-term deflation due to renewable energy being relatively very low cost to generate after the infrastructure is in place. Last, but certainly there is more, the US exports a massive amount of oil and gas. Divesting from fossil fuel production would have a significant impact on GDP (find your own source).
This is why the US doesn’t invest in infrastructure that doesn’t generate significant ongoing income like it once did - it simply doesn’t make enough money. We only act once it is falling apart.
It is all about the money, man. That money is power. It keeps the Corporatocracy and those at the top of it in charge, the US as the primary reserve currency and allows the US to have a huge, formidable military.
Oh, I thought you were being sarcastic. It was clearly Citizens United (2008) and the explosive growth of Super PACs that followed.
Unlimited spending from the fossil fuel industry basically standardized Republican candidates on climate denial talking points. Plus whatever bizarre fetishes random Republican billionaires had, like Adelson keeping Gingrich's primary campaign on life support for months. That fucked up Romney's pivot to the general election for no perceivable gain to any of them. According to Wikipedia Adelson spent over $90 million on losing candidates in 2012!
Well - greed explains this though. Plus, you can also run fake-policies - the USA has done so numerous times before. Flip-Flopping happens in both parties there.
So John McCann did run on reducing fossil fuel usage and promoting a greater mix of energy technologies but I wouldn't say that changed by 2012 per se. McCain himself was the anomaly that didn't match earlier or later candidates. For example, Bush did open up ANWR to drilling, even though that was purely symbolic and nobody is going up there to drill or has done in the 20 intervening years (apart from some minor exploratory drilling by Chevron).
Also, I'd say McCain's policy was more based on a national security argument than a climate argument. As others have pointed out, fracking changed everything. In 2008 we were a huge net importer of oil. Now we're a huge net exporter.
Mines (including oil wells) are huge wealth concentrators. A handful of very wealthy people benefit hugely from resource extraction. And the US government, as a whole regardless of party, represents the interests of large corporations both domestically and overseas.
Anyway, Bush (either one) didn't run on renewable energy. Neither did the candidates that came after. 2012 was just a reversion to mean.
Big coal got involved. Undoubtedly one or more billionaires in the dirty energy industry would have seen their substantial wealth dwindle to the mere single-digit billions and started paying politicians a lot of money. There's simply no other explanation because to actively kill clean energy projects that are 90% complete and is not only cleaner than coal but also now cheaper is simply illogical and irrational.
It's manufactured grievance. Opportunists politicize losing positions for political gain because they're inherently anti-elite, anti-establishment and upset experts and the informed.
Upon this antagonization is conflict which brings on drama, eyeballs, and advertisers.
It's an attention flywheel that brings loyalty, builds a moat, and sets a differentiator...
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben.
There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs.
This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year.
The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
Not only are older solar panels recyclable, but efficiency gains in panel construction mean that multiple newer panels can be created with the resources from older panels.
Wind turbines are not recyclable[1]. Besides, the foundations use a massive amount of concrete (nowadays often extracted from the seabed, with all the problematic ecological consequences involved), that stays forever in the ground.
Existing wind turbines turbines are not recyclable - new wind turbines are.
Except, that's not even true. Some existing wind turbines are not recyclable.
Except that's not entirely true either! The tower portion of the turbine is usually steel, and easily recyclable! The nacelle, too. It's the base and the blades that can't be recycled.
Except that's not entirely true either! Existing turbine blades are made (mostly) of fibreglass, which is made of the fibre and the resin. The fibres aren't reliably as strong when recycled (which makes them not-very-useful when recycled), but the resin is just fine. And of course, if the blade is e.g. carbon fibre, then you can either re-use it or just burn it.
So, you statement should be that some (components of) existing wind turbines cannot be profitably recycled with current technology.
The wind turbine's concrete base doesn't need to be smashed up or ignored, incidentally - it can be re-used. Concrete is much sturdier than the e.g. gearbox.
None of this is economically profitable, which is why right now it ends up in massive landfils. The concrete base is reinforced with steel beams and weights so much that you can't move it.
Also sorry but I would require a citation for "new wind turbines are recyclable". That the tech exists doesn't mean that all installed turbines have it.
Concrete recycling is actually a pretty big deal. For most of building history here the standard material to put behind basement walls, retaining walls, and so on, for drainage was crushed scoria. Now it's crushed concrete. Some amount of effort but you're recycling existing stuff, and they recover the reinforcing steel as well.
Who cares? Those blades and that concrete are totally inert and just sit in the ground after their useful life. The ground already has lots of rocks in it.
The problem is that those power sources are marketed as "renewable" (they aren't as they quickly end in landfills), are intermittent, require fossil fuels for when the wind doesn't blow, and are not profitable.
One could also say that they change heavily natural landscapes, but this is a matter of taste.
The finiteness of fossil fuels isn't real in a practical sense.
The globe burnt about 8.8 billion tons of coal in 2024. Which is a huge amount. This is the peak, most estimates are that we will reduce from there.
Australia alone estimates that it has 147 billion tons of economically recoverable coal. That is Australia alone could supply the entire globe at peak usage for over 16 years. And Australia only has about 14% of the globes coal reserves, we can keep burning coal at this pace for at least the next hundred years. And it a hundred years the scope of what we consider to be economically recoverable will have expanded greatly, further increasing our supply.
A more sci-fi apocalyptic angle on this fact is the argument that fossil fuels, especially easily accessible ones, are necessary to bootstrap a futuristic multi-planetary civilization. They provide the easy energy necessary to support an industrial revolution and the society and technology level necessary for more advanced and renewable forms of energy necessary to really build and sustain an advanced civilization long term.
But because they take so long to form, stumbles along the path of energy advancement mean a planetary civilization could run out of fossil fuels before reaching the level of advancement necessary to move beyond them. At that point, the civilization is essentially doomed since they lack the technological ability to move beyond fossil fuels and they lack the energy resources necessary to develop that technology.
CO2 can be converted to methane. It just isn't profitable to do so yet. After the fossil fuels are depleted, it will be a viable niche for storable energy where renewables aren't practical.
Once fossil fuels run out, most exclusively-fossil-fuel-based activities will simply cease to be economically feasible.
That doesn't contradict your statement, of course. But in the long term the fossil fuel niches will start looking more like today's rocket-fuel niches.
Methane synthesized from excess renewable power can store that renewable power for years, handily fixing the whole "Sun don't shine every day" problem.
It's durable energy storage and can be easily moved around like liquid fuels.
It also would remove CO2 emissions from things like airplanes, which won't be able to be battery powered in the near future, and could renewably replace chemical feedstocks in lots of industrial processes.
But this requires immense industrial capability, probably some serious innovation in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere because that's basically an unsolved problem right now, and a massive oversupply of solar power which cannot happen under market systems because nobody builds infrastructure to sell power at below market rates.
True. The situation for both off-gassing and plastic recycling is rather bleak.
Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.
Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.
Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
Similar to the idea that electric cars are net worse for the environment because some of the materials used to make them. Worse than 20 years of burning gasoline in an ICE car? It's so ridiculous.
it depends where your electricity comes from actually. In west Virginia it comes from coal so is worse than a hybrid but still better than non-hybrid gas cars (in terms of CO2)
No it's not. The efficiency of an EV Motor > efficiency of ICEV motor. Even with 100% black coal. The carbon is reduced by about 30% IIRC (that number can and does improve as the grid greens).
It’s so interesting seeing some of the comments about this. The sentence I wrote after that blames war and global devastation on fossil fuels. I was expecting to get flak for being too harsh to fossil fuels but somehow it swung the other direction. Which, as someone who shouts at the radio when the greenwashing oil ads play on NPR, is heartening.
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA.
Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.
Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.
And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.
The article here starts with:
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.
The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.
We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.
The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.
But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.
Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.
Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.
The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.
Hardly. China is also betting on nuclear fission and nuclear fusion:
1. Fission: TMSR-LF1 (a thorium breeder, molten salt research reactor)
Based on US work in 1960s and independent Chinese Sinap work in 1970s.
They recently published that they had detected Protactiunium in the salt - a new milestone.
I know that China's actively researching Nuclear fission, fusion and even have the world's first thorium reactor pilot - in fact, they might even be having a lot more effort and investment being put into nuclear than the rest of the world combined. But they aren't putting all of their chips and actively betting with a Hallelujah on fusion to provide energy. They're ramping up renewables production side by side while still funding fusion research.
Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.
China knows better than to weaken their position in the global theater by having large dependence on other nations for energy. They are aiming for domination and they are well on their way.
China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).
Actually, it seems China has given up on the feasibility of BRI because they don't control all the variables in their partner countries. Which is why Xi has been super focused on creating an autarkic economy dependent on domestic demand and encouraging production for the native population, as a back up. Failures in helping industrialize countries such as Pakistan and those in Africa due to systemic and unavoidable issues have soured on the Chinese. That autarkic vision hinges strongly on a solid renewables energy production base.
Well the Trumps, Thiel, etc are all invested heavily in a bunch of publicly traded nuclear fusion and nuclear fission companies, so those presidentially-backed firms are seeing outsized funding gains.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
I don't understand this? A couple of people responded with clear charts showing nuclear way behind on solar/renewables with solar/renewables growing faster too.
It looks like you've been misled but are having trouble admitting that to yourself?
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
> The US is still ramping up oil and gas production
This also happens in China. With better ratio for renewables but still. Globally there was more energy from coal than before. Much more was from renewables but in context of climate change absolute numbers of CO2 are what matters.
EU is also reverting it's green targets because of this new situation. So near future does not look good.
That's production, not consumption. The US exports huge amounts of oil and gas now. The EU/Russia sanctions and the Red Sea blockade are a huge gravy train for American oil and gas companies.
The us president held a fundraiser for petroleum execs late in 2024. He promised to kill as many renewable energy projects as possible. They donated a billion dollars to his campaign. And he followed through.
Got a way of using that tasty oil cleanly? Maybe we want to reserve those complex hydrocarbons for some other use like growing crops, making solid rocket fuel, or some other national priority.
Nuclear - Yes, craft regulations that make sense and squeeze all the damned energy possible out of that 'waste'. No, I don't mean burn the fuel the easy way only - I mean send it back to military run reprocessing centers to concentrate the power and make the (effective) half life of the waste decades rather than civilizations of time (yes, concentrating it, there will also be some super mild things that decay slowly enough to be useful in other applications rather than waste).
We want to maximize energy in the long, medium and short term. Try Everything.
The rhetoric around "energy independence" always sounded like it was pointing exactly toward renewables, and it's hard not to see the missed opportunity in hindsight
Can’t power the military with renewables. Need nuclear and fossil fuels for that. One doesn’t want to be dependent on foreign nations to power their military.
What are you talking about? Renewables don't require fuels, unlike the fossil fuels that the US has invaded several countries for (most recently taking actions against another country just this month).
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
To be fair Australia also has approximately infinitely more sun than most of Europe does. But true, we could be doing a lot better in the EU regardless
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.
My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.
I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.
I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).
It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.
All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.
EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.
What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?
Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.
That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.
£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.
If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
Is there any truth to the climate sceptic claim that solar in the UK can’t generate useful power with our bad weather and cloud cover? I always said that it’s not like Germany has better weather but they have tons of solar. However it would be great to have an answer from the UK.
It definitely generates useful amounts of power, especially in the summer. The problem is that we still need gas plant, and the distribution infrastructure ready for the rest of the year when it isn't so effective.
Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.
They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.
It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.
We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.
But what surprises me most in this entire debate is how little we talk about the biological cost of CO₂ itself. We focus so much on the globalized damage to the climate that we’ve overlooked the direct, physiological tax that combustion is levying on our bodies. For some reason conservative governments want us to continue to trade our atmospheric oxygen for carbon dioxide through the burning fossil fuels. I wrote more about this topic on substack:
Over 90% of new power generation being built (both domestically and globally) is renewables. We do it for the same reason China and everyone else is: it’s just cheaper now.
That’s the best reason because it’s the one that gets the job done. Renewable energy prices will keep falling while fossil fuel prices rise, widening the gap.
In 25 years there will be little fossil fuel generation left.
Meanwhile in Italy, the whole renewables discussion is gaslighted by "we should actually consider nuclear" and "wind turbines ruin the panorama".
I'm not against nuclear per se, but it's like this part of italians don't realize that:
1. if you decide to make a power plant today, it won't be online before the 2050s, in the best case scenario. It's very difficult to bring nuclear plants online, especially in the west. Even the countries with the capital and know-how (US and France) see more projects cancelled than brought online. I think US has put online a single nuclear plant in 20 years, France not a single one.
2. Nuclear needs tons of water, we have less and less of it as it rains less and global warming doesn't accumulate enough snow in the alps (which generally melts in the summer), our rivers are literally dry stone most of the year.
3. Renewables can be attached to the grid (or close to where they are needed) in the span of few months and with very little know-how required.
4. Money isn't limitless, building a 20B+ nuclear plant (realistically 50 knowing these projects + Italy) means this budget won't be available for the next decade on projects that could bring benefits immediately.
I'm sure that Italy and Germany, which are manufacturing heavy countries that need lots of energy cannot rely renewables alone, of course nuclear should be considered, but hell, in my region (around Rome), 95% of our energy comes from imported natural gas, I'm sure we could invest some more in that.
I’m anti nuclear on cost reasons but that’s excessively pessimistic. Nuclear can use seawater for cooling, and being colder offsets the cost premium of using salt water.
Your 2050’s comment assumes a level of dysfunction that’s presumably exaggerated. Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The cost of canceled nuclear projects is generally quite low compared to lifetime subsidies of nuclear. Nuclear may be an inefficient use of government resources, but it’s also offset a staggering amount of emissions and the subsidies tend to end back up in the local economy recuperating some of the expense. IMO, there’s probably dumber things your government is doing that are worth fighting instead.
> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.
There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.
Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Depends on what you consider the start date. Practically speaking there’s some investigation into building nuclear in Italy that already occurred but using that as a start date isn’t meaningful here. Similarly the announcement you point to was a long way from having everything required to actually build a power plant.
Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
> These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.
The 10 year estimate comes from a range of projects including some that go very badly and others that didn't.
You can always pick worse numbers by using a smaller sample of projects, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful to do so. California’s high speed rail has gone far worse than Italy’s projects, America is currently comically bad at large construction projects.
They go over budget because regulatory burdens are very high, not because of any fundamental unknowns in deploying the technology. A motivated national government could reduce the cost substantially.
Australia fortunately has a political neutral research organisation (CSIRO) whose job is to estimate the net cost benefit for various government programs.
Needless to say not at all cost effective to go nuclear at this point. There's no reason that wouldn't hold similarly in other nations since the scale of the difference in costs are so huge too.
Hasn't stopped certain parties from doing the same thing as Italy though, the CSIRO being credible really hurt their efforts though, Murdoch press tried & failed to discredit them with ferocity.
Worst part is, even if price comes down I think they further poisoned the idea of nuclear in Australia because their plan was brazenly to keep the coal & gas plants running in the meantime rather than spend money on wind/solar. They didn't even make an effort for their timelines and costs to be remotely believable.
We're only energy independent in the sense that we export more oil than we import. We're still reliant on foreign oil because we haven't retooled (or built enough new) refineries for a lot of the oil we produce. Allowing the Saudis to own refineries is probably a strong factor there. If the middle east and Canada cut us off, we're SOL. Venezuela barely produces anything right now.
Retooling refineries to a different flavor of crude is expensive, but not that expensive. If push came to shove, the US could transition to oil independence in less than a year.
I thought the same thing, ... where is the "and Greenland!"?
The amount of hard, soft and economic power that are being burned for the bedtime stories of one person is unreal. As are all the cooperators and lobby harnessing conspirators whose actual dreams are getting implemented.
It isn't the fall of the USSR, but it is still a dramatic ceiling bounce.
I mean Venezuela is a touch iffy on how strongly we commit but saying the USA basically owns Canada isn't exactly controversial maybe controls is a more acceptable way of phrasing it? They are a "sovereign" with a lowercase S at best.
Canada fucking hates the US right now and are actively in discussions to deepen their relationship with China, and cut back on their relationship with the US.
And it would have been possible if not for the support on this platform and similar ones for people like Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, like the youth says these days: FAFO
It’s about incentives. We are “energy independent” compared to China and the EU. With China, if its relations with Russia sour and if they get cut off in Djiboutis by any number of powers, they will be a world of hurt.
We chose this path because the U.S. dollar is underpinned by fossil fuel markets. Also, batteries do not have the energy density to mobilize a mechanized military.
Our elites refuse to concede dominance of the affairs of the world, so they will never allow the fossil fuel infrastructure to decline unless forced.
By contrast, China has every incentive to do the right thing.
The USA doesn't (over any long historical time) push for anything much like corporatism, but instead for capitalism ("corporate capitalism” or “crony capitalism” to those who view “capitalism” as a utopian free market system and not the concrete real-world system for which the name was coined by its critics, I suppose.)
The US has been pushing toward something blending corporatism and kleptocracy under Trump II, but I suspect that people using "corporatism” to refer to a longer-term effort of the US are misusing "corporatism” (where the body—“corpus”—actually refers to the aggregate of government, business, and social institutions, all of which are interlocking and working together, with interlocking formal control structures for that end) to mean “capitalism oriented specifically around the interests of corporations”, i.e., "corporate capitalism”.
