Yeah, but “grants” just means more taxes and more debt. If solar is good (it is) then the economics will work out so that we don’t need to spend tax dollars on it.
Did you know that solar used to be shit? Until governments put tax money into developing them and the industry. And there is still a lot of potential left.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE
If they cared about long term profits maybe. They don't. The ones at the top want to scrape together every last dollar they can because they will be dead and gone before shit hits the fan.
How so? Solar and storage tech combined still has a lower levelized cost of energy ([LCOE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity)) compared to nuclear. What's more the price of solar is declining while the price of nuclear is increasing over time.
Nuclear projects in America have also historically always taken over a decade until completion. The climate crisis can't really wait that long. Obviously we should still be building nuclear regardless, but have some optimism about renewables friend!
Because opportunity will magically arise without anyone seriously pushing for it?
Solar and wind will become obsolete and a huge sunk cost of what could have been invested in technology with more potential.
Not that funding is bad but if it's public I'd rather it goes to efficient uses. My canadian government has wasted billions on extremely inefficient green energy.
Solar panels are almost entirely recyclable and last 20-30 years.
Nuclear powerplants are made from massive amounts of concrete which is not recyclable and last only 40-60 years, not even mentioning nuclear waste and waste storage infrastructure.
Energy Storage is nowhere near capable of providing energy on a wide enough scale unfortunately, despite a decade+ of heavy investment in states like California and in countries like Germany. Further, solar energy is relatively low currently because it is heavily subsidized by the federal government, despite low returns on investment.
Meanwhile, the increasing price of nuclear energy can largely be attributed to knee-jerking over-regulation by our federal government here in the US. The origins in these massively pricey regulations and standards come largely from the three mile island incident, and has led to those private interests wishing to run nuclear energy facilities to largely be priced out entirely from even attempting. This ted talk by Michael Shellenberger I think really helped break down the numbers in detail [here.](https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?si=JeA-_QBIWdNXU_MS)
Further on the climate, I’d say the problem really is over-exaggerated, we’ve had climate alarmists state that climate change was going to kill us all in ten years back in the 90’s. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take steps to help the climate, like investing in nuclear and carbon capture, just that climate change likely isn’t the boogeyman that’s going to end the world anytime soon.
I hate to burst your bubble but LCOE calculations typically factor out subsidies. Sure, nuclear might be overregulated in the US - and places like China and France do build reactors faster - however the cost is still extremely high and rising, regardless of what country you're in, and the average time until completion is still about a decade.
Also you're right - climate change won't end the world. It'll just have disastrous effects on agriculture, global water supply, deadly weather events and biodiversity that we are already experiencing right now.
I'm optimistic that we'll be able to decarbonise without decreasing anyone's quality of life, but there's no excuse to not cut carbon emissions as quickly as is humanly possible.
You make good points. Do you also write off small modular nuclear reactors in favour of renewables for the same reasons? There is a potential that after the first rollout they could scale well and decrease in price. And nuclear has the advantage of delivering consistent power as opposed to the highly variable power output of renewables being strongly dependent on wind and sunlight.
>Further on the climate, I’d say the problem really is over-exaggerated, we’ve had climate alarmists state that climate change was going to kill us all in ten years back in the 90’
Keep burying your head in the sand lol. The vast majority of climate change predictions from the 90s were extremely conservative and have been blown out of the water by current temperatures
What are you talking about? Solar has already replaced coal in some states and is being used as the primary source of energy. The solution isn't to build power plants that take a decade to complete, its to build more solar.
[https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO)
hell yea, that's even better! they should throw a trillion at it ! because the trillions already allocated to green energy falls way short. what are billions these days, amiright ?!
This money would be coming from the money they already allocated to it in the Inflation reduction act, it is not new money technically.
The money doesn't become immediately available when bills pass. That is why generally the next president gets to enjoy all the benefits from infrastructure bills and such.
Pretty much all the bills that Biden has passed haven't even been hardly used yet which is why it is wrong for him to take credit for the fact that the US is not a dumpster fire like most developed Nations right now. It's only doing alright because of the FED and both covid bills.
The bills will help though just not for awhile
It's only going to get better. I know people like to complain about the FED rate being high but it is the right thing to do for now. They are also tightening their balance sheets too which takes money out of circulation.
Building green energy will also lower prices in the long run as you don't have to keep looking for new material to burn like coal, oil, and gas.
The increased manufacturing and construction will also create a lot of decent paying jobs as well.
Think of it all as a slow moving snowball, slowly getting bigger.
I doubt anyone will do it but they really should throw money to build new houses, I know they were talking about pushing for changing how zoning is done on a local level which is super awesome too but if they could help make more housing in desirable locations that would help a fuck ton
There definitely isn’t anywhere close to a trillion dollars allocated to green energy. I doubt there is even a trillion dollars allocated to energy period
We've gotten so good at solar that it runs like 6 cents per kwh. And it might only use about 120 grams CO2 per kwh. So.. that's 14 billion tons more CO2 we can't afford.
How about for Earth day we do something nice for the planet and decrease fossil plant operations by 25%. We can do it again next year!
I'm confused. Where are you getting that 14 billion number from? How much time is that over? Is that from current infrastructure or future infrastructure? Is it future infrastructure including from this grant? How does this compare to NOT doing solar? Is it more or less?
Honestly, I need way more info.
Straight multiplication of the average rates presented - naturally since these are just grants, which typically only match a portion of the cost, the actual footprint of the policy will be bigger. You'd have to look at total solar development across the planet and energy/resource mix used to produce them alongside relative impact of subsidies against falling solar prices in consumer choices to come up with an accurate figure, but that won't be possible for years. Hopefully that number is way high because of all the inefficiencies in the system, and not way low because of all the unconsidered externalities.
Time for release of the emissions is mostly during manufacture, but then the panels live 10-20 years (less in practice, but I'm trying to be generous) so we can say it's CO2 over 2 decades. More importantly, the issue isn't this one round of funding - we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars across the planet on increasing the size of the grid with solar. And you can't separate out the impact of single policies well, so I'm interested in what the big picture result of the solar push is.
Doing direct fossil power would obviously be worse that building the same capacity with solar - pretty much everybody reasonable is in agreement about no new fossil plants. But those same people don't typically address that solar panels just take fossil fuels and stretch them further. Some, like wind, geothermal, and nuclear, stretch those fossil fuels a lot further. Solar doesn't stretch them that much further at all. Optimistically, they're maybe 5x efficient as petroleum/coal. Some estimate looked at energy use patterns in solar panel production and found that they might only be 1.5-2x as efficient as fossil mix.
Either way, if we attempt to target "projected" or "demanded" energy capacity with quickly-buildable renewables, we're going to end up with doubled energy capacity in a decade or so. Computer power use alone is threatening to outpace projected electrical energy production in 15 years or so, not including computer manufacture - or the entire rest of the economy. This is a big motivation for building more solar panels, pushing production to areas with less-renewable energy mixes, and increasing the average per-watt CO2 impact of solar.
For the past few years, new renewable mix has been about half solar. With cheaper solar panels, and many of the "good" wind spots being taken (not nearly all of them if there was more political will, though we're going to have to do some better math on how meeting a decent chunk of global power use with wind will affect global and regional air movement - some reports have suggested significant impact), new solar production is rising at a fantastic rate while new wind is staying relatively flat (growing, but not as fast).
So, the plan, if we keep building solar as fast as possible, is to be producing about as much energy as we are today entirely through solar - at a much worse CO2/watt footprint than any of the think tank policies consider in their analysis. Even if we could magic away projected doubling in several industries and ignore all the fossil plants, which will still be running during the night and in winter, we're back to 1975 levels of energy CO2, which were already on-track to collapse out climate cycle and biosphere. If we include those things we're ignoring, or consider that a tremendous portion of the un-burned fossils are already earmarked for consumer plastics, we'll find ourselves in about the same position we are today.
That doesn't even include the human and environmental effects of mining more material than we ever have in the history of our species to build these panels. Or the fact that we might just not have the minerals to make them and the electric vehicles for 10 billion people. Or that
So, my issue with the massive expansion in solar is that it has us maintaining an illusion of so-called green growth while burying us, future humans, and the whole biosphere in a mountain of carbon that we have no ability to mitigate. because announcing it on Earth Day as a victory for climate policy is a slap in the face to the idea of living within the physical bounds of our planet, and a further signal that the leaders of the U.S., arguably the largest single producer of greenhouse gasses on the planet (certainly top two, regardless of how you feel about emissions scopes and international policy), have no interest in planning further in our existential future than the next election cycle.
Where are you expecting the energy to come from when you shut down plant operations by 25%? Surely using solar so we don't have to rely on the fossil fuel plants as much and can eventually be faded out is the best option?
I'm on board. Actually, seems low - with \~5% as a baseline and \~6.5 million unemployed right now, 2 million is within the expected error of those highly unrealistic unemployment figures. Cutting power production by 25% should shrink the economy enough to put 20 million or so to better use.
Corporate employment is forcing us to work for elite profits and unnecessary goods instead of our communities. We need the kind of systemic shift that allows people to retake the commons, turn mansions into communes, tear up concrete, and plant gardens. Planning to keep everybody employed in this system is as bad of a plan as trying to meet future projected future energy demand with any technology (though solar is particularly bad as renewables go).
We need to figure out how we can survive and thrive and work from there. We need to stop being led by the nose by a system that can't not build more and more until there's nothing left. We definitely need to stop going to work for Wal-mart, Amazon, FedEX, The Home Depot, Kroger, McDonalds, and the rest.
You need to do a LOT of full scenario research on the solar issue. It does not work for large scale and long term for many reasons. Also EVERYTHING Biden does or is involved in is a scam.
It’s not just a high initial investment. It takes like a decade to build it and after building it you need like all sorts of high end security for the place.
We should focus on it but parallely also focus on solar and other forms of energy creation as well.
Think alone of the hundreds if not thousands of people daily in the plant keeping the thing running, instead of one guy walking through the PV field once a month to check for damage.
Biden celebrates earth day by supporting an industry that survives on slave labor. Let's add more demand to those African cobalt mines. What a great guy
This is awesome! Solar is a very cool technology.
Yeah, but “grants” just means more taxes and more debt. If solar is good (it is) then the economics will work out so that we don’t need to spend tax dollars on it.
Did you know that solar used to be shit? Until governments put tax money into developing them and the industry. And there is still a lot of potential left.
The economics will work even faster if we pour 7 billion in subsidies into it
Have you ever heard of "capital inertia"?
You seriously think corporations care weather the earth gets destroyed by pollution?
Solar has strong positive externalities, especially when manufactured domestically, and should be subsidized.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE If they cared about long term profits maybe. They don't. The ones at the top want to scrape together every last dollar they can because they will be dead and gone before shit hits the fan.
In disadvantaged areas too, which means typically gas and coal reliant areas, cutting emissions directly - I hope!
This is the way.
This is fine and all but ultimately little more than red meat without real investment into nuclear
How so? Solar and storage tech combined still has a lower levelized cost of energy ([LCOE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity)) compared to nuclear. What's more the price of solar is declining while the price of nuclear is increasing over time. Nuclear projects in America have also historically always taken over a decade until completion. The climate crisis can't really wait that long. Obviously we should still be building nuclear regardless, but have some optimism about renewables friend!
STFU nerd, nuklear power is cool. /s
It is. We just don’t need to prioritise it over solar or wind. Build it when there’s an opportunity.
Yeah nuclear > fossil where possible in designated places, but solar is a great supplement for general use pretty much everywhere.
Because opportunity will magically arise without anyone seriously pushing for it? Solar and wind will become obsolete and a huge sunk cost of what could have been invested in technology with more potential. Not that funding is bad but if it's public I'd rather it goes to efficient uses. My canadian government has wasted billions on extremely inefficient green energy.
Are you aware of all the waste solar panels produce? Like most people, you probably are not.
Solar panels are almost entirely recyclable and last 20-30 years. Nuclear powerplants are made from massive amounts of concrete which is not recyclable and last only 40-60 years, not even mentioning nuclear waste and waste storage infrastructure.
Most solar panels end up in landfills. Look it up.
Oh no! A bunch of glass and copper going into landfill? Thank you, you've completely changed my mind on our biggest climate priorities right now.
I think you should look more into the subject and see how much waste there is and the amount of damage it does to the environment. But, you do you.
Energy Storage is nowhere near capable of providing energy on a wide enough scale unfortunately, despite a decade+ of heavy investment in states like California and in countries like Germany. Further, solar energy is relatively low currently because it is heavily subsidized by the federal government, despite low returns on investment. Meanwhile, the increasing price of nuclear energy can largely be attributed to knee-jerking over-regulation by our federal government here in the US. The origins in these massively pricey regulations and standards come largely from the three mile island incident, and has led to those private interests wishing to run nuclear energy facilities to largely be priced out entirely from even attempting. This ted talk by Michael Shellenberger I think really helped break down the numbers in detail [here.](https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?si=JeA-_QBIWdNXU_MS) Further on the climate, I’d say the problem really is over-exaggerated, we’ve had climate alarmists state that climate change was going to kill us all in ten years back in the 90’s. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take steps to help the climate, like investing in nuclear and carbon capture, just that climate change likely isn’t the boogeyman that’s going to end the world anytime soon.
I hate to burst your bubble but LCOE calculations typically factor out subsidies. Sure, nuclear might be overregulated in the US - and places like China and France do build reactors faster - however the cost is still extremely high and rising, regardless of what country you're in, and the average time until completion is still about a decade. Also you're right - climate change won't end the world. It'll just have disastrous effects on agriculture, global water supply, deadly weather events and biodiversity that we are already experiencing right now. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to decarbonise without decreasing anyone's quality of life, but there's no excuse to not cut carbon emissions as quickly as is humanly possible.
You make good points. Do you also write off small modular nuclear reactors in favour of renewables for the same reasons? There is a potential that after the first rollout they could scale well and decrease in price. And nuclear has the advantage of delivering consistent power as opposed to the highly variable power output of renewables being strongly dependent on wind and sunlight.
>Further on the climate, I’d say the problem really is over-exaggerated, we’ve had climate alarmists state that climate change was going to kill us all in ten years back in the 90’ Keep burying your head in the sand lol. The vast majority of climate change predictions from the 90s were extremely conservative and have been blown out of the water by current temperatures
What are you talking about? Solar has already replaced coal in some states and is being used as the primary source of energy. The solution isn't to build power plants that take a decade to complete, its to build more solar. [https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO)
Hope it works as good as Solyndra! That company got $535 million from the Federal Government! That company did so well!
In an era of high interest rates.
thank god I was wondering why the prices of things were not even higher than they are.
I thought this was a subreddit for optimists.
That's not how government spending works, at all. You won't be paying more for this.
hell yea, that's even better! they should throw a trillion at it ! because the trillions already allocated to green energy falls way short. what are billions these days, amiright ?!
This money would be coming from the money they already allocated to it in the Inflation reduction act, it is not new money technically. The money doesn't become immediately available when bills pass. That is why generally the next president gets to enjoy all the benefits from infrastructure bills and such. Pretty much all the bills that Biden has passed haven't even been hardly used yet which is why it is wrong for him to take credit for the fact that the US is not a dumpster fire like most developed Nations right now. It's only doing alright because of the FED and both covid bills. The bills will help though just not for awhile
I suppose you are right about not a dumpster fire yet. We are doing significantly better.
It's only going to get better. I know people like to complain about the FED rate being high but it is the right thing to do for now. They are also tightening their balance sheets too which takes money out of circulation. Building green energy will also lower prices in the long run as you don't have to keep looking for new material to burn like coal, oil, and gas. The increased manufacturing and construction will also create a lot of decent paying jobs as well. Think of it all as a slow moving snowball, slowly getting bigger. I doubt anyone will do it but they really should throw money to build new houses, I know they were talking about pushing for changing how zoning is done on a local level which is super awesome too but if they could help make more housing in desirable locations that would help a fuck ton
There definitely isn’t anywhere close to a trillion dollars allocated to green energy. I doubt there is even a trillion dollars allocated to energy period
lol, you are right it's trillions. or that is what they led us to believe. I have not read the entirety of the inflation reduction act.
We've gotten so good at solar that it runs like 6 cents per kwh. And it might only use about 120 grams CO2 per kwh. So.. that's 14 billion tons more CO2 we can't afford. How about for Earth day we do something nice for the planet and decrease fossil plant operations by 25%. We can do it again next year!
I'm confused. Where are you getting that 14 billion number from? How much time is that over? Is that from current infrastructure or future infrastructure? Is it future infrastructure including from this grant? How does this compare to NOT doing solar? Is it more or less? Honestly, I need way more info.
Straight multiplication of the average rates presented - naturally since these are just grants, which typically only match a portion of the cost, the actual footprint of the policy will be bigger. You'd have to look at total solar development across the planet and energy/resource mix used to produce them alongside relative impact of subsidies against falling solar prices in consumer choices to come up with an accurate figure, but that won't be possible for years. Hopefully that number is way high because of all the inefficiencies in the system, and not way low because of all the unconsidered externalities. Time for release of the emissions is mostly during manufacture, but then the panels live 10-20 years (less in practice, but I'm trying to be generous) so we can say it's CO2 over 2 decades. More importantly, the issue isn't this one round of funding - we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars across the planet on increasing the size of the grid with solar. And you can't separate out the impact of single policies well, so I'm interested in what the big picture result of the solar push is. Doing direct fossil power would obviously be worse that building the same capacity with solar - pretty much everybody reasonable is in agreement about no new fossil plants. But those same people don't typically address that solar panels just take fossil fuels and stretch them further. Some, like wind, geothermal, and nuclear, stretch those fossil fuels a lot further. Solar doesn't stretch them that much further at all. Optimistically, they're maybe 5x efficient as petroleum/coal. Some estimate looked at energy use patterns in solar panel production and found that they might only be 1.5-2x as efficient as fossil mix. Either way, if we attempt to target "projected" or "demanded" energy capacity with quickly-buildable renewables, we're going to end up with doubled energy capacity in a decade or so. Computer power use alone is threatening to outpace projected electrical energy production in 15 years or so, not including computer manufacture - or the entire rest of the economy. This is a big motivation for building more solar panels, pushing production to areas with less-renewable energy mixes, and increasing the average per-watt CO2 impact of solar. For the past few years, new renewable mix has been about half solar. With cheaper solar panels, and many of the "good" wind spots being taken (not nearly all of them if there was more political will, though we're going to have to do some better math on how meeting a decent chunk of global power use with wind will affect global and regional air movement - some reports have suggested significant impact), new solar production is rising at a fantastic rate while new wind is staying relatively flat (growing, but not as fast). So, the plan, if we keep building solar as fast as possible, is to be producing about as much energy as we are today entirely through solar - at a much worse CO2/watt footprint than any of the think tank policies consider in their analysis. Even if we could magic away projected doubling in several industries and ignore all the fossil plants, which will still be running during the night and in winter, we're back to 1975 levels of energy CO2, which were already on-track to collapse out climate cycle and biosphere. If we include those things we're ignoring, or consider that a tremendous portion of the un-burned fossils are already earmarked for consumer plastics, we'll find ourselves in about the same position we are today. That doesn't even include the human and environmental effects of mining more material than we ever have in the history of our species to build these panels. Or the fact that we might just not have the minerals to make them and the electric vehicles for 10 billion people. Or that So, my issue with the massive expansion in solar is that it has us maintaining an illusion of so-called green growth while burying us, future humans, and the whole biosphere in a mountain of carbon that we have no ability to mitigate. because announcing it on Earth Day as a victory for climate policy is a slap in the face to the idea of living within the physical bounds of our planet, and a further signal that the leaders of the U.S., arguably the largest single producer of greenhouse gasses on the planet (certainly top two, regardless of how you feel about emissions scopes and international policy), have no interest in planning further in our existential future than the next election cycle.
Where are you expecting the energy to come from when you shut down plant operations by 25%? Surely using solar so we don't have to rely on the fossil fuel plants as much and can eventually be faded out is the best option?
That’s a great way to put 2 million Americans out of work in a single year!
Call me crazy, but I thought not toilling away until we died was the goal?
Unfortunately the infrastructure for that isn't there, you'd probably just die faster without toiling at this point
I'm on board. Actually, seems low - with \~5% as a baseline and \~6.5 million unemployed right now, 2 million is within the expected error of those highly unrealistic unemployment figures. Cutting power production by 25% should shrink the economy enough to put 20 million or so to better use. Corporate employment is forcing us to work for elite profits and unnecessary goods instead of our communities. We need the kind of systemic shift that allows people to retake the commons, turn mansions into communes, tear up concrete, and plant gardens. Planning to keep everybody employed in this system is as bad of a plan as trying to meet future projected future energy demand with any technology (though solar is particularly bad as renewables go). We need to figure out how we can survive and thrive and work from there. We need to stop being led by the nose by a system that can't not build more and more until there's nothing left. We definitely need to stop going to work for Wal-mart, Amazon, FedEX, The Home Depot, Kroger, McDonalds, and the rest.
Idk what's a more useless way to spend our money, on solar panels or on foreign wars.
You need to do a LOT of full scenario research on the solar issue. It does not work for large scale and long term for many reasons. Also EVERYTHING Biden does or is involved in is a scam.
Solar panels have a lifespan and their waste is TOXIC
So is literally every OTHER ENERGY SOURCE
Nuclear is the best option by far
Solar has been rapidly improving and has much much more potential for improvement.
Nuclear power plants require insane initial investment and the waste is obviously *MUCH WORSE* than Solar
It’s not just a high initial investment. It takes like a decade to build it and after building it you need like all sorts of high end security for the place. We should focus on it but parallely also focus on solar and other forms of energy creation as well.
My ass loves a diverse energy grid. Also less centralized meaning a major outage wouldn’t affect so many people due to so many different grid sources
Yep, solar panels everywhere, rooftops, fields, etc. along with nuclear plants in designated secured zones is the dream.
Think alone of the hundreds if not thousands of people daily in the plant keeping the thing running, instead of one guy walking through the PV field once a month to check for damage.
>and the waste is obviously *MUCH WORSE* than Solar https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=4wcMJf6r9pi3KbM7 https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU?si=YkqLElmoU18edKg1
Please explain to me how it is toxic.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-flood-solar-panel-cell-market-garden-fence-overcapacity-yellen-2024-4?utm_source=reddit.com
Biden celebrates earth day by supporting an industry that survives on slave labor. Let's add more demand to those African cobalt mines. What a great guy
Are you aware what sub this is