Makes sense, lots of open land and lots of sun. Just don't tell MAGAs.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Solar energy needs to rebrand to space coal or solar oil
space-based fusion technology
SkyFuel™
The Radiance of God.
"Woke libtards are STEALING all the sunlight from Texas to power their satanic abortion machines!"
No one has ideology, morality or conscience, the millisecond renewables are cheaper, they will take over.
Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.
Renewables are cheaper, but we've been here before. There's more to this than just energy cost.
Do you have any source for that? I find it difficult to believe that the only reason for using steam over water mills was the dastardly exploitation by capitalists.
Water mills only produced a set amount of power that could be increased orders of magnitude by coal and steam.
The only reason was that coal power was available in cities, water power wasn't. You can cast it as for exploitation, but exploitation of the urban poor was going to happen anyway, coal power allowed them to make factories in the cities
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yeah, IIRC, in 2000, renewable oil from rape seed was still cheaper than fossil oil. however renewable oil was banned politically sothat there's no food vs fuel debate tearing society apart. the question really is more complicated than simply the cost.
that being said, solar panels can be put anywhere, including near big cities, and transporting electricity over distances has also gotten easier in the last 200 years, so that's not an argument for coal anymore.
well said
that being said, china subsidized solar panel production heavily for 20 years until they became economically self-sustaining. so there was a large amount of ideology involved i'd say.
economists were calling for the US to do that the whole time, too, for exactly the reason that eventually something becomes the cheaper way to do something and then everyone does it. every era of innovation has been kicked off by public investment into technology that hasn't a profit right now but someday will.
the government is supposed to take a 10-30 outlook on things and act accordingly because corporations never will. they only ever look 4 months into the future.
but then, if you've been alive long enough, you probably recognize that if the government can't, or doesn't, take that long term view then the government is useless at protecting you from business and that business is just fucking you over for blood money
That one probably isn’t really ideology so much as strategic necessity. To my understanding, China is a major energy importer, with a dependence on fossil fuels coming in via the South China Sea. They’re in an exceptionally vulnerable position because a blockade wouldn’t be particularly difficult to implement there (at least, if their opponent is the US), so any degree of energy independence they can give themselves is imperative.
They've also maintained a hundred-year plan since at least the 90s.
At any given moment, their strategic policy is looking so far ahead that everyone in the government will be dead and their grandkids will be old by the time it comes to term.
US politics can't seem to past the four-year election cycle. Biden tried with the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, and CHIPS, but you see where those landed. Severely diminished bills that narrowly passed and were among the first things on the chopping block when his successor entered office.
And yet people call it a grift because it would have taken at least 8-10 years to see the results even if it hadn't been dismantled.
The amount of systemic change that needs to happen in the political and economic landscape realistically cannot happen in under four years from start to finish. It will require long-term investments in infrastructure projects that take years to build, which means at some point voters are gonna have to be patient and stop flipping sides whenever conditions don't materially improve overnight.
In other words, we're fucked...
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Not true. Trump is actively sabotaging wind as we speak. Trump is doing vice signaling, not economics.
Lawmakers from both parties are raising concerns about the Trump administration's spending decisions. In the latest example, the administration said it will pay nearly $1 billion to energy companies to abandon plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast. Liz Landers joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.
Happened recently in conservative Romania
Renewables are already cheaper*, wind and solar.
*depending on where you are in the world.
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Business friendly energy hungry state with enormous plots of undeveloped real estate does the logical thing.
News At Eleven
Incidentally, NGL plants are being built out rapidly in Texas for a tangential reason. Unlike with coal, an NGL plant can turn itself off and on quickly and easily. Consequently, when the sun is shining, NGLs can turn off rather than selling electricity into a cheap market. And when it is night/overcast, they turn on to make up the difference
Natural gas can also use efficient modern turbines. Coal plants are a nonstarter in the modern era because they run so dirty with impurities that you have to use shitty turbines that are down for maintenance cleaning all the time.
Natural gas turbines can bypass the need to boil water and drive steam turbines, because the actual combustion of the gas creates the rotational energy directly.
Steam turbines are pretty great, though. Not sure how the rest of a coal plant operates, but the turbines themselves shouldn't be touching any combustion byproduct.
I believe they also recover the heat to boil water to run steam turbines. Double the turbines.
NGL is yet another TLA (three letter acronym)
tell us what it means at least once!
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Texas lines up with the Sahara desert. Cheap land. The economics are insane.
They can't stop it, it's hilarious. Good news.
They can’t stop it, it’s hilarious.
It is utterly sad that they want to stop it, to burn more coal.
Oil has not been kind to Texas. Greed took control.
As someone who has never been to Texas, I associate Texas with unrelenting sun and vast tracts of uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value (ok that bit is hyperbole, I know deserts are in fact a delicate ecosystem but you get the idea).
Or in other words, perfect solar panel real estate.
So what's stopping them taking advantage of all the almost free energy!
Hail.
uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value
As I understand it, the partial shade created by solar panels will often be a plus for the ecology of the land below solar panels. Especially in a sun scorched place like Texas.
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Now MAGAs will blame the cold winters on renewables because solar panels stole all the sunlight and warmth.
Please don't give the idiots something new to complain about.
Given the major blackouts the state had recently, I'm not surprised.
Texas Gov actually tried to blame the winter blackouts on solar & wind rather than ngl power plants in the region not being properly winterized thus freezing up in their biggest time of need.
Woke liberal nonsense! How do you get electricity from the sun?!
One of my friend's fathers keeps telling everyone about how solar panels do more damage to the environment than coal because of how they are made. I asked him how they're made. No clue, he said.
On another note, Florida was attempting to pass a bill to start using solar energy. The opposition mounted a campaign that claimed that solar panels would block out the Florida sun, chase away tourists, and be twice as expensive as other power sources. I cant remember if the bill passed or not.
Unfortunately, we have a long way to go when it comes to breaking people's programming on renewable energy.
It will eventually take over everywhere because unlike every other form of energy each year it gets better and cheaper.
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Friends in Texas tell me there's surprisingly much liberal thinking there now. A lot of the shut your mouth shit kickin' image is a holdover from the recent past, since Republicans have appropriated patriotism and the whole Marlboro Man thing. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Allen West, who moved there from other states, are using that as marketing to the good-old-days audience. Texas is far from a traditionally Republican state - in the 20th century it voted blue in 16 out of 25 presidential elctions, and there's a decent chance Texas could flip Democrat in the coming midterms.
My friends in Texas tell me it's a lot more liberal than outsiders would think. The shit-kicking Marlboro man image has been fading into the past for some time, but got CPR from politicians like Ted Cruz who moved there from outside to milk the image for their own gain. Texans are not historically Republican - throughout the 20th century they voted for Democratic presidents 2/3 of the time.
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