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U.S. solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after
(pv-magazine-usa.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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That's actually a problem.
All realistic plans for 100% renewable (or even 95% renewable, which is substantially easier) rely on a multipronged approach of wind, water, solar, and grid upgrades. Each one has upsides and downsides, but you can use the upsides of one to cover the downsides of another. Combined, you get a reliable grid based on intermittent but cheap sources.
Capitalism sees this plan and decides to deploy the one with the best immediate ROI. Which happens to be solar. Problem is that you can't just rely on solar. The grid is hitting limits where electrical production is sending prices to basically zero at certain times, but not able to provide enough the rest of the time. That will shift the economic incentives. Eventually.
It'll figure out what researchers have already written down, but it'll take too long to get there.
Batteries
Batteries are nice, but they're insanely expensive at this scale and ruin the entire point of helping the environment. Carbon emissions from huge batteries are unbelievable.
What batteries exactly? The capacity required is huge.
They can be distributed though. I Install solar, most of the systems we install with batteries end up selling back a significant portion of their charge to the grid (iirc our system wide average is 40% nightly resale)
So not only is each house with a battery not using grid power at night, its powering almost half of an equivalently sized house.
Granted, batteries are still on the expensive side, so these systems aren't coming enough ( I think we're at ~10% of our systems have a battery)
A competent government that believes in basic science, would give tax breaks to encourage this.
Sure, but even then we don't have a solution today. It's all in the fuzzy future.
Yeah, that's a step in correct direction, but can you guarantee that everybody can be powered 24/7 through renewables/batteries, specially during winter? Unless that's the case you still need a shit-ton of non-renewable energy that's coming either from fossil fuels or nuclear. And if you want to avoid (co2) emissions, then you need nuclear to cover everybody, and if you have nuclear then it has to run 100% 24/7. OTOH if you don't have nuclear, you'll emit all sort or crap during those periods. And so on. Also, it's not just that batteries are sort of expensive, they are big. Also you are talking houses, but masses live in apartments where placing solar panels or batteries isn't possible (at least in quantity).
No one will ever have the idea of simply having more batteries right? It's all in capacity not quantity, because quantity would be to easy right? Got it.
Where do you have TWhs of batteries? As you said, both quantity and capacity matters, when lower capacity you need bigger battery which is harder to put somewhere.
SoCal has a huge amount of wind and solar right now. Utility sized battery installations are going in to deal with the times those two aren't producing.
Even home battery solutions. We have solar panels & a Powerwall. Were part of a Virtual Power Plant along with around 1500 other Powerwall owners in the region. During peak usage in the summer all our PowerWalls feed back to the grid so that our utility provider doesn’t have to spin up expensive (and dirty) peaker plants. We get paid a premium for the power we provide during these events.
I saw articles here on Lemmy just a month or two ago that Tesla successfully tested a VPP in California that consisted of 100,000 PowerWalls.
The ones they've installed near us are Siemens and the only reason we even know they exist is we went by often during installation. The cabinets are now hidden behind a high wall. I'm guessing they're going in all over the place. Strange that I've never seen them mentioned in the news anywhere.
Is it? Wind is 10% and solar is 4%
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
Yes, and we're already seeing prices go negative with that mix. This shouldn't happen (at least not very often) if it's built properly.
Well that's an average and it will differ greatly with seasons. What percentage is problematic?
It's not really a 'problem.'
If push came to shove, we could just wait before putting the panels online.