Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar and yet the trends continue because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
Guardian probably has it in the contract with their employees that their articles on an average must have 1 mention of Trump. That's how you sell news.
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
+1 to the Guardian for mentioning their data source, but -1 for not linking to it.
+2 for EMBER for having a data source AND being able to link to the parameters that show solar overtaking coal for the month in the US.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar and yet the trends continue because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.
The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.
Battery storage is right behind.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinese-battery-make...
https://electrek.co/2026/02/23/texas-is-about-to-overtake-ca...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-installa...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Oil next.
In other news:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh.
So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
- Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range)
- Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206
This is in the face of massive growth for grid demand for the first time in decades, so the trend will accelerate.
New gas turbine manufacturing capacity is tapped out, causing new gas CapEx to get more expensive:
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/gas-turbine-prices-so...
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477729
Guardian probably has it in the contract with their employees that their articles on an average must have 1 mention of Trump. That's how you sell news.
Your comment reminded me of this classic: https://youtu.be/EYMjvXdrZIw?si=rYpJm3SP2kcAWPs_
All so that we can ruin the world with AI.