Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
The LNG also takes up 3x the volume in shipping.
Also LNG in Europe is currently over $15/mmbtu, and 55% efficiency applies only to advanced (expensive) combined cycle plants that need to run 24/7 to achieve that rate. Peaker plants are less than half as efficient.
So instead of 25-30 times more energy/$ from solar, its closer to 35-50 times, before including the cost of the power plants that burn the fuel.
It is blatantly not motivated by the economy (except the few vested interests).
It is mostly about power.
Okay, waiting for economics to take over then. If the markets really do work the way economists imagine then solar will become the only viable investment and power dynamics won't matter in the end.
There are other expenses and location also plays a big role, but it is certainly true that solar is much cheaper when all is said and done. Hence why the energy transition continues in the US even without subsidies.
I don't know, man. What if its cloudy?
Me shouting the answer, but you can't hear it over the bombs exploding across the Straight of Hormuz
You can use batterys
I mean yes, but also then the investment gets a lot bigger too.
In my country (Estonia), if we did solar + batteries only, the batteries would have to be large enough to withstand electricity consumption being smaller than production for the entire summer (which at its peak has 18 or 19 hours of sunlight per day and most people don't have AC so our summer electricity usage is smaller than winter).
And also from about october to march, there's almost no sunlight, and electricity consumption is through the roof because heat pumps have been pretty common in new builds and renovations for like 2 decades now, replacing mostly solid fuel furnaces rather than resistive electric heaters.
Which is not to say we should abandon solar, but it'd be incredibly cost-prohibitive to go renewables-only here. In the summer our electricity prices often go negative already (still zero + network fees for consumers, not really negative prices -.-), but in winter I've seen 5 euros per kilowatthour at peak times.
Now I googled the cost of a terawatt hour of battery capacity and Google's AI was happy to report to me that a terawatthour is a million kilowatt hours and thus at ~80€/kWh it would be 80 million euros. That's peanuts! Just 640 million would get us enough battery capacity to store a year's worth of energy, that should surely get through a winter!
Trouble is, I was taught slightly different values for the SI prefixes and back when I went to school, tera was a billion kilos. So if it still functions that way, we're talking hundreds of billions instead. Our national budget for the year is 20 billion. But if every person with a job paid just a million extra euros in tax, we could afford to do it!
So obviously, solar alone + batteries won't do it at such a high latitude. Wind power helps a ton, but that's still unpredictable. And after everyone on a flexible-price plan saw a 5x increase on their power bill for january (1000+ euros being pretty common), I don't think the people will settle for "works most of the time". We actually need a nuclear power plant and we need it to be built before December 2025.
Till then we'll continue burning dirty ass coal and (yay, even worse) shale. Which I fucking hate, but the economic reality of our country is that this is what we can afford right now, with a gradual buildout of solar + wind.
But funnily enough, if we got the hundreds of billions worth of batteries magically out of thin air, the cost of buying enough solar panels to produce the entire country's annual electricity consumption every year... Would be in the hundreds of millions range or a bit over a billion at most if this meme/infographic is to be believed, even if adjusting the capacity factor, which is more like 10-15% here due to our nasty winter. Chump change pretty much for a country like ours.
analysis for Nebraska that would apply for Estonia or Canada as well with only a few parameters changed. Free 24/7 baseload solar electricity if Hydrogen can be sold for $2/kg (equivalent to 25c/liter gasoline in range). https://lemmy.ca/post/59615631
This is the funny AI response that says both millions and billions for the cost of a terawatt hour of battery capacity. For my own calculations I actually went to the source at Bloomberg and took a number that was on the lower side, but not the minimum, of the range they provided for 2024.
I don't think we have to worry about AI developing the I part of AI anytime soon.
Also, in 2024 we roughly doubled our peak solar output from 600 MW to 1300 MW! (2025 unfortunately saw a LOT less new solar installation).
But our winter peak consumption is 1600 GW, so this is still a bit under 0.1% of that. And peak production is in the summer :/
You don't need 1twh of batteries to support 1gw of solar you need 2-4gwh depending on wanting 2 or 4 hours of overnight storage. Prices are dropping so fast, or so low now, that 6 hours is an easy option to choose. But for winter, see my other post on H2, or just don't nuke your legacy power from orbit, and keep them as backup/battery equivalent.
You don’t need 1twh of batteries to support 1gw of solar you need 2-4gwh depending on wanting 2 or 4 hours of overnight storage
At the present state of things, you're definitely right.
I'm talking about winter, where you can count on solar panels producing... nearly nothing.
This is a company here in Estonia sharing customers' monthly production numbers. This is a company trying to sell you solar installations, so they have no reason to show any numbers as lower than reality. I clicked through several customer experience pages, and most have ~30x less energy generated in December vs May.
The Nebraska comparison in your other reply to me doesn't work out because Nebraska is way further south. In December, the sun doesn't "rise" here as much as it "drags its' rotting carcass across the horizon". Okay, we're not as far north as something like Svalbard, but the angle of the sun during solar noon on December 21 (shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere) is around 7 degrees. In Nebraska it stays around 25 degrees. While we technically get up to 6 hours of daytime even in December, it's usually overcast so average sunshine per day is about 30 minutes over the winter. And if it's not overcast, you can expect it to get cold fast, driving up usage.
So to go full solar (which I'm discussing as a thought experiment, I don't actually know anyone who wants to go FULL solar), essentially all the energy needs to be generated in about 7-8 months each year, because once the days start getting shorter, they go short REALLY fast. That's going to be a lot of H2 to store.
or just don’t nuke your legacy power from orbit, and keep them as backup/battery equivalent.
That's a reasonable suggestion, it's just that we're not burning anything clean like coal here, we're burning shale. It's comparable to lignite (if not worse) in CO2, but way more ash. Yes, shale the actual rock, not shale gas.
It's super frustrating.
Does the wind not blow in Estonia?
You can generate hydrogen from electrolysis.
Electrolysis efficiency is about 70% and you can store the hydrogen in pressurized underground caverns for a year or longer using another 0.12 kWh per kWh of hydrogen stored, which makes a total efficiency of around 0.6 kWh of hydrogen generation and storage for every kWh of electricity that you put in. (Source)
So if your electricity costs 6 ct/kWh (current LCOE of solar in many places), then hydrogen is gonna cost 10 ct/kWh to generate and store with current technology.
Currently, natural gas is around 5 ct/kWh, so solar would have to become a little bit cheaper to make it economically competitive.
Edit: to clarify, the 5 ct/kWh for natural gas is the gas alone; electricity from natural gas is more expensive than that (around 12 ct/kWh) and more expensive than solar.
is home hydrogen a thing? i was wondering before, if it works in cars, why is it not in houses?
There's a engineer that did it in his backyard. I'll see if I can find it when I get home.
Technically it could work. However, traditional batteries make a lot more sense. Hydrogen makes some sense for a vehicle because it can be more energy dense (it actually only makes sense for large trucks). However, it has to be stored at cryogenic temperatures. In a place where you probably don't care about mass or space much, other battery technologies are far better, without the added cost of cryogenic cooling and having to deal with hydrogen, which leaks through anything.
That sounds cheaper than battery storage (which at latitudes bigger than yours can get very expensive since there's little to no sun in the winter), and I'd assume more environmentally friendly than mining all that lithium as well.
How expensive is it to build out said caverns for this use, particularly if there aren't many natural ones available?
basically the caverns that are being considered/used for this are the same caverns that natural gas was extracted out of in the first place ... they clearly held some sort of gas fine for millions of years, so certainly they're gonna store a bit of hydrogen too.
Oh that makes sense.
We just don't have any natural gas production in Estonia lol. Perhaps the shale mines could be used. Unfortunately the biggest one had its permit extended till 2049 recently. Also I think they get filled with water naturally (they pump out a lot of dirty water), so I suppose the walls aren't actually completely sealed naturally.
yeah, geological availability might vary
only problem with me personally about this, is that i'm stuck with gasoline using car, i dont have money to buy 50k electric car :/
Get one used... The batteries are good enough now that even used, they are a good investment
Cars in general are the problem and even if they all went electric they'd be bad. (But cities would be much quieter and they are hella fun to drive.)
If you're able to use a bicycle for some of your trips instead of a car, that's a good change. (And if you're not then you might not even be able to use an EV car if you could afford it. It takes way longer to charge a battery than to fill a gas tank.)
We got ours for 30k with 200 miles on it, retails 45k.
Dealerships hate buying these cars used because they think there isn't a market for used ev's, in part because they're so expensive, anyone who wants an ev can afford to buy one new, they think the second hand market isn't there, go in and offer to buy a used one and see what your dealer says, I bet you can get one for half that.
Also there's some electric only second hand dealerships starting to pop up. Maybe one in your area?
Ikr? I could have had $10k BYD Dolphin, but we haaaad to do the tariff wars.
I will offhandedly mention that ebikes are getting pretty good/cheap nowadays, but that's obviously not going to work for everyone.
20k EUR would get me a Dolphin Surf over here, Dolphin is over 30k. We also have tariffs because the EU has an auto industry to protect from cars being sold under cost of manufacturing too. Dacia Spring can be had for like 15k.
It's not a bad deal for the average person looking at a vehicle they don't have to work on, but 2k for a used Audi gets me a significantly more comfortable car that's also more powerful and has twice as much cargo space. I don't even like Audi, it was just the cheapest 6 cylinder diesel wagon around with isofix at the time. Also the list price might've been 2k, I actually paid less because it was ugly as sin (in terms of paintwork, not the model itself).
The economics don't work the same if you're incapable of maintaining a 20 year old German executive car at home (which most people aren't), but for some of us, ICE vehicles are DIRT cheap because you can get a 20 year old one that really has 90% of the tech you'd want in a car, and is missing all the stuff you don't, parts are cheap, and doing your own work on a car is as much therapeutic as it is work. And the reason I specifically go for these vehicles is that they're cheap because people are afraid of the complexity and unreliability, but I'm familiar with them and know how to keep them on the road indefinitely without going bankrupt.
So part of me wishes I had an EV, but the other part of me says I'd be paying 10-20X as much for a vehicle with inferior driving characteristics (I don't mean acceleration, I mean the suspension setup in budget EVs, I have well-designed multi-link front and rear, adaptive dampers and it's all on air springs) and less space. I'd gain a fancy touch screen, but that actively repels me.
Now I did test drive an Audi E-Tron as those are available for cheap (for a big EV SUV), but I was very disappointed with the comfort in that. Literally not comparable to my 20 year old A6 Allroad, which isn't even most comfortable car I've owned. But as EVs have undergone rapid development in the last 5 or 6 years, I think that there's finally stuff available that I'd actually like to own. In 5 more years when they're depreciated to hell and the powertrain and battery warranty starts running out.
I don't know anything about the situation in the US, but you get a great second hand EV for around 12.000€ here in Germany. Combustion is cheaper to buy but gets more expensive over time. It has over 250 moving parts, EVs have like 7.
problem with second hand ev is that if the battery has to be replaced, might as well just buy new car entirely
I'm solar fan #1, but 5x that price would still be a good deal on panels
