Even solar energy’s biggest fans are underestimating it (www.motherjones.com)

submitted 2 months ago by pelespirit@sh.itjust.works to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip

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The details of solar’s expansion are even more surprising

Not every country is riding the solar power rocket to the sun just yet. Individual countries have seen peaks and dips in solar installations based on how well their economies are doing and how strong their policy incentives are, like feed-in tariffs, net metering, and tax credits.

In the past couple of years, the global story has really been about China. Add up every solar panel installed in the US in history and you get how much China installed last year alone, almost 60 percent of all new solar installed in the world. The sheer scale of this deployment broke a lot of forecasters’ models.

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[-] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

When the sun sets, add wind. In some cases, add water. These can all work together. Also, batteries are definitely a thing.

[-] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 0 points 2 months ago

The issue is storage. We can harness it, but we can't use it all without overwhelming the distribution hubs, and without effective energy storage it just gets wasted. Alternatively, we could build energy hungry sectors near the solar farms, but they are usually in rural and hard to reach places.

We should continue expanding the capacity globally, but without some big breakthrough in energy storage, full transition is unlikely.

[-] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

I disagree, people can do their own energy needs, make it a home thing. We get rid of the conglomerate energy people and we get cheap energy, win-win.

[-] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

That's the thing. You can't do it on your own in most places all the time. You have to be connected to the grid anyway for when you can't sustain your usage. And even if you over sustain your energy needs in a few places around the world, you have to be connected to the grid to send the surplus to the grid by regulations.