solarpunk memes

This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there's a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can't just dump grid power

it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.

There are of course solutions, but that doesn't mean it's not an engineering challenge to implement.

Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.

Here's the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here's the study it's reporting on.

I'd say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California's solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is "economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?" This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven't read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it's premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn't pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it's an interesting topic.

Don't worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.

There is literally limitless energy available to us. But as long as the people in charge benefit from people believing the supply is limited, people will be made to believe the supply is limited.

That's why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.

Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.

It's so efficient that I can't fit my money cog into the machine!

I mean yes, but what's genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn't shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert, to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not complety resolved, yet.

the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.

Screen caps need dates. These tweets are pretty old from memory. It feels like making a joke about rotary phones not fitting in your pocket, it's out of date.

I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don't have any way to store the extra energy.

Problem counter: 0

There are two parts of this problem:

1. If you are connected to the grid and using it you need to pay for it somehow. This is not a capitalisim thing this is a maintenance issue. Deploying lots of rooftop solar reduces the amount people are paying the grid operators for the same infrastructure as before while they are still using it. This could be solved by making the grid operators public utilities again and charging taxes instead of billing electric rates. Either way rooftop solar owners are going to need to pay grid fees unless they are entirely disconnected from the grid (this is rarely ever the case).
2. It creates issues where generation may outstrip load as well as transmission and storage capacity. A lot of this can be solved with more investment but if you are earning less of power sales and still need to maintain everything this can be financially challenging.

There is also a third problem where home solar isn't centrally planned resulting in cases where utilities need to delay homeowners' solar installations while they figure out grid capacity.