Solar power satellites that beam down energy via microwaves anywhere in the world solves this but like most energy alternatives it undermines the energy monopolies.

I worked on a phase 0 grant submission team in a college class a couple years ago on the operations and finance end with other teams in other schools - CS/engineering, etc - for an underwater energy storage system.

Essentially everything was faked. The math didn't check out and the engineering students called this out over and over. It just didn't work and even if it did they would almost never recoup their costs. But grant approved, CEO who worked with us all who was very bright always brushing us off if we touch if real cost outside of being almost fully subsidized. His firm has been doing this with gas and solar since the 90s, seemed pretty cool till you see how the sausage is made. To be honest a lot of what his firm made was real functional stuff, but this cash grab while Biden was throwing around wind money was crazy.

It was absolutely wild to realize all this was just a game

Nuclear or bust

You should ask for price, availability and energy density

Living in an area where wind / solar are being developed and the energy transmitted to far away locations I can say that the environmental impacts are enormous. Landscapes that have been untouched for millenia are now forever disturbed in important desert habitats and migration corridors. Competing energy providers build thousands of miles of high frequency transmission lines right next to each other. This does not even account for the extraction of raw materials needed to make the turbines or panels, nor the disposal of turbine blades which have caused big problems In Wyoming.

This is all so individuals in far away cities of Utah and California can feel good about renewable energy. The energy source may be continuous but the real impacts to the landscape and wildlife are negative and also continuous.

Not a silver bullet by any means.

Agreed price is a strong signal, but price *of what* is important especially with solar. When it comes to electricity, one must take into account reliability/availability.

The metric I most recommend is not cost per MW installed (nameplate,) but one that takes into account the costs of baseload generators (e.g. gas turbines) to support variable generators (solar or wind) to incorporate reliability across a regional grid, inclusive of the cost for capacity reservations, diversification of location, etc., called the “Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity” to get to 95% reliability, for example.

“…their usage is often hamfisted into places where they're not the most economic choice, and where they are not the most economic choice… “ this is fundamental

Laughs in oil and gas industry subsidies.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine. The scattered secret subsidies and externalised costs across all of energy from the greenest to the dirtiest muddy the waters so bad it is impossible to know what is really cheapest.

Solar does have the perk of being very highly sovereign as energy options for your home go, so if that is something you really care about and not just as a LARP you should get quotes and run the numbers for real.

The solar panels bolted to the top of my campervan are great for charging my leisure batteries but try plugging anything in that isn’t 12v at night and the life is getting drained out 🪫 faster than liquidity during a shitcoin pump n dump

Notably, Egypt has recurring summertime electricity shortages, and despite being literally in the Sahara desert has been unsuccessfully trying to substantially increase its solar energy production.

Solar power and storage is often not the super-cheap sustainable panacea that theory-crafters make it out to be.

https://worldsustainabilitycollective.com/why-has-egypts-solar-policy-failed/

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/01/why-egypts-plans-for-solar-power-are-left-in-the-shade

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In Australia the entire east side of the country is a network that has a spot price mostly un-tampered with except for some inter-state fees the governments charge each other for their energy investments. We have a ton of solar (and wind) and in summer our prices regularly go negative during the day (paid to consume). Solar farms get kicked off the grid to prevent over-voltage (I'm sure they mine when that happens). There is no more economic incentive to put in more solar, but there's growing incentive to add batteries for the peak in electricity consumption that comes just after the sun goes down.

Australians are lucky that the majority have their own roof (and lots of sun), rather than another apartment above them and a lot of Australians have put their own solar systems up as a solution to their own energy costs.

There was a good effort by the state governments to install smart usage meters on each house for accurate billing and now that we experience huge price spikes in the peak periods that are measured and billed accurately, battery installations are rapidly gaining pace.

It's got its merits. I'd like to see us continue with solar as a default addition to our housing infrastructure development instead of a substitute for major energy projects.

Solar and wind is cheaper.

But the government spends billions every year subsidising coal and oil industry so they can compete against solar.

Here in Australia the government created a sum tax to prevent people putting solar power back into the grid because solar is so cheap that if they let everyone with panels sell power it would drive the price down so low that coal fired power plants would go bankrupt.

Wait, so did you post this just because you don't understand that electricity from coal fired power plants also needs to be transmitted across the grid?

The alternative is a coal fired power plant in every house.

Instead of putting solar panels on your roof? 🤔 Weird logic

The global fossil fuels industry has been subsidized and price rigged for many decades, so the true cost of renewable vs. non-renewable energy probably isn’t possible to calculate.

That’s true but so is the externality ignored on the fossil fuels side too. The cost of waste water from a coal plant, hospitalisations for miners, etc etc has historically not been born by the producer. It may be easier for governments to just subsidise the renewable option than try to quantify and tax the non-renewable to truly cover the externality.

Absolutely! another interest and important aspect I've been thinking about lately apart from the economic argument, which is complex and hard to measure as you've mentioned as all economic activity is according to an Austrian economist, is that solar energy AND batteries is a great decentralizer force too.

These great centralizers of the EU using solar energy as a their huge moral posturing tool might have unleashed, through their enormous subsidies, the biggest energy decentralization movement in history :D

This is not trivial at all. Energy decentralization changes everything. You can now basically run a car, or any machine with local energy. That's a phenomenal step towards freedom and sovereignty of local communities!

In the sense of, they wanted green energy but instead they got a million self-sovereign Liechesteins with their own energy! ahah

That’s called, REALITY.