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points by AnthonyMouse 3 days ago | 0 comments

> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler

The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.

Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.

[–] chii 3 days ago

> at night to burning fossil fuels only at night

only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.

[–] Animats 3 days ago

Full startup and shutdown of a coal plant can take days, but throttling down to about half power during low-load periods is normal. Power plants do this every day. Late at night, load decreases and plants throttle down. Every morning, between 0600 and 0900 local time, there's "morning load take-up" as load increases.

The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.

Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.

[1] https://www.epri.com/research/products/3002012979

[–] Maxion 3 days ago

Yep, I live in Finland where we are quite far ahead of the curve when it comes to renewables and nuclear. This is one large problem. When it's winter and cold and dark, solar does not help. Wind only helps when its windy.

Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.

Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.

[–] olegp 1 day ago

Unrelated to the topic, but if you happen to live in Helsinki, you should join our HN meetup, if you haven't already: http://bit.ly/helsinkihn

[–] Maxion 1 day ago

Thanks oleg! I have, but have been lazy and not yet showed up :D

[–] pebbly_bread 2 days ago

>Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.

How long is the hope those batteries will last? There's surely no way Finland can run off battery power for even one month, much less a whole winter.

edit: perhaps I misunderstood and your comment on batteries was more related to the reliability of wind?

[–] weberer 2 days ago

Yeah, the batteries are for wind. There are some days when the wind barely blows at all. That's when electricity prices really spike.

Finland's power grid stats are open to the public. You can click the month view to see how the different power sources fluctuate.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

Also fun fact: a lot of solar panels in Finland are mounted vertically to walls rather than rooftops. That's because we're so far north that the sun just hangs around the horizon rather than going directly overhead. You end up catching more sunlight pointing directly south.

[–] dns_snek 2 days ago

Budgeting for over a month without power is unheard of. Extreme scenarios ("dunkelflaute") are measured on the order of hours, maybe days, and they get shorter and less frequent the larger the grid is.

[–] leonidasrup 3 days ago

"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.

"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...

[–] IX-103 2 days ago

You don't get thermal and pressure stresses from throttling or even going into hot standby - the pressures and temperatures are the same, just the flow rate of steam changes. You only get thermal and pressure cycles from full shutdowns. As long as you keep the reactor/furnace warm then there's no issue here.

[–] Ericson2314 2 days ago

Well Coal is already cooked

[–] Havoc 3 days ago

Yeah the US will lag behind on this.

Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.

Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos

[–] rob74 3 days ago

Other countries are better positioned already because they don't have an administration funded by the fossil fuel lobby - but even that doesn't explain some of the decisions, like preferring to reimburse $1 billion in already paid leases rather than letting a company build wind farms on the leased area (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/23/climate/trump-totalenergi...).

[–] Maxion 3 days ago

Spain suffered a black out partially due to the lack of momentum (spinning generators).

For Europe to get rid of more fossils without putting the grid at risk we will need more storage.

[–] Lio 3 days ago

I surprised we can’t, or rather don’t, make more use of tidal energy.

That and low energy density storage located at sea with the turbines.

[–] pyrale 2 days ago

The issue with this logic is that you build a cliff where, at some point, you need to massively invest in storage, and the storage industry hasn't had time to mature alongside the solar/wind industry.

[–] Ericson2314 2 days ago

Yeah it's crazy how many people are in denial of this.

Storage has been making impressive strides, but the cliff here (in storage and transmission, the latter of which we in the US still are sucking at) puts nuclear back in the running.

[–] AnthonyMouse 2 days ago

If you want sooner demand for storage in the form of batteries then electrify transportation.

[–] HDThoreaun 3 days ago

It doesnt make economic sense to serve the entirety of daytime electricity demand from solar without batteries. Youd have to tons of fossil fuel plants that turn off during the day and then back on every night. For solar to take the next step batteries are a requirement

[–] Panzer04 3 days ago

It's not quite as bad as that, since you don't consume fossil fuel resources when plants aren't running, but this is mostly a benefit for oil/gas plants, not coal (since the coal is likely useless without the power plant consumer anyway)

[–] shagie 3 days ago

Depending on the type of power plant, it can take quite a while to spin up (or down) one of them and get them to optimal power production.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956

If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.

(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)

[–] adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago

That's not really a problem. A spin up over a couple hours matches nicely with the slow sunset over a continent. The sun takes ~4 hours to go from a bit above the horizon in the east coast to a bit below the horizon on the west coast (solar panels make some power in twilight).

Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.

For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.

[–] traceroute66 2 days ago

> The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.

It might help if the US wasn't so anti off-shore wind at the moment.

[–] shagie 2 days ago

I live 900 miles from the coast. While the Great Plains are a good source of wind power ( https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is... - Iowa is 43 billion kWh of production - https://iuc.iowa.gov/regulated-industries/electric/iowas-ele... ), I believe it is generally a mistake to assume that power solutions that work for the Atlantic coast can provide power solutions half a continent away.

[–] HDThoreaun 3 days ago

The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable

[–] pinkgolem 3 days ago

You might want to update your numbers, 1 kwh is somewhere between 50€/kwh to 75 including electronics... No economics of scale, shipping included..

That makes 300B

Eu pricing

[–] GlibMonkeyDeath 2 days ago

That sounds like a lot right? But it isn't large compared to US wars to protect energy resources (>$4T just for post-9/11 wars), and the payback it would generate over decades to come. In fact, this level of investment is a total no-brainer, compared to the benefits it will generate (forget about even the climate benefits - just the other economic and defense benefits.)

And we can sure find those trillions when we want to: https://defensecommunities.org/2026/04/trump-requests-1-5-tr.... Or https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend.... Or...

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

The war in Iraq cost a trillion dollars.

[–] GlibMonkeyDeath 2 days ago

More like $2 T (combined Iraq-Afganistan $4.3T) https://www.warcosts.org/compare/iraq-vs-afghanistan-cost

[–] Saline9515 3 days ago

Do you imply that it was really cheap, just like solar+batteries?

[–] eptcyka 3 days ago

So far.

[–] banktops 3 days ago

1 week national battery storage is totally doable. All we need to do is convince the rest of the planet to stop making GPUs, phones, computers, and EVs for the next decade, and then give us all their rocks. 78.4TWh is about $19T (all in costs) for a national battery grid for 1 week storage, could be built over ten years but would need the US to build and own double the current global output, not even considering where all the raw materials and labor comes from.

[–] traceroute66 2 days ago

> The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night.

And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)

If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.

Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.

[–] jerven 2 days ago

Is that actually that much more than building 400GW worth of nuclear generation capacity (assuming 10 hours of nighttime)? I think that, that simple calculation shows that it is viable. Even a trillion is 1/32th of the US GDP. Construction over a decade should not stress the US economy at all.

I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.

[–] pinkgolem 2 days ago

A night goes 8 hours or so, so you need 50gw of nuclear

[–] loomy7 2 days ago

Current li-ion pricing is $19 per kwh (BYD's latest cell's pricing), so a single battery that covers all 4TWh would come in at 76 billion dollars. Still a shit ton but reasonable.

[–] fpoling 3 days ago

Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.

[–] thelastgallon 2 days ago

US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.

Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.

EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.

This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.

[–] HDThoreaun 2 days ago

I think this is a pretty decent idea and hopefully within a decade at least california will be doing it. The problem though is that the biggest advantage of an EV is that you charge it overnight and never need to worry about going to the gas station or running low on power. I think a pretty significant number of people would want 100% charge every morning which makes the total addressable battery size a good bit smaller.

[–] bijowo1676 3 days ago

USA should explore Pumped Storage Hydropower more, it has same or better efficiency than battery storage and can use existing facilities like hydroelectric dams

[–] buckle8017 2 days ago

The largest pumped storage facility in the world is in the us.

It's also pretty old.

"USA should look into thing it practically invented" good meme

[–] bijowo1676 1 day ago

then why are we bothering with importing batteries from China if USA has solved the problem with pumped storage ???

dont you see the problem with USA solving the problem and USA still having a lack of energy storage issue ???

[–] shagie 1 day ago

Dispatch time, total installed capacity, and regional power grids.

Batteries have a much faster dispatch time than pumped storage. Pumped storage is good for offsetting reduction in other production capacity, and its dispatch time is faster than peaker plants, but its not as fast as a battery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_Uni...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833

2020 numbers had 22,894 MW of capacity. More storage capacity for power is needed.

The "where are things located" is in the mountains where there's a significant elevation change. Most of the country is too flat to have pumped storage be practical. Installed pumped storage in Michigan (about 2GW of capacity there) does little for the power demands of North Dakota.

And then... there's also building new ones.

    Even though FERC has issued licenses for three proposed pumped storage projects since 2014, no new pumped storage projects have come online in the United States since 2012. EIA’s most recent survey of planned power plant additions shows no pumped storage projects under development.

That may be in part from the 2005 failure at Taum Sauk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

    At 5:12 a.m. on December 14, 2005, the northwest side of the upper reservoir was overtopped when water continued to be pumped from the lower reservoir after the upper was full. This led to the catastrophic failure of a triangular section of the reservoir wall and the release of 1 billion US gallons (3,800,000 m3) of water in 12 minutes. 

   ...

   As of 2011, Ameren was reported to have paid a total of close to US$200 million in settlements related to the 2005 breach.

[–] shagie 3 days ago

Part of the pumped storage problem is "where can you do it?"

There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...

https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...

You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.

The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.

It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.

Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )

Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.

[–] justincormack 3 days ago

Coal is a dead end anyway.

[–] rr808 3 days ago

That might work in The SouthWest of the USA, but the Northern bits dont get enough sun to get through the day, so you'll need fossil fuel plants all day night for the Winter. If they're there already its cheaper to use all day in the summer as well.

[–] acdha 2 days ago

It’s more expensive to use them all day: that’s the problem facing power plant owners where renewables are so much cheaper that they break the economics for power plants which were designed to run continuously but are more expensive when wind and solar supply is limited.

(That’s the answer for the northeast, too: New England has no shortage of wind all winter long and batteries don’t care where the electricity comes from)

[–] saltcured 3 days ago

Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?

[–] AnthonyMouse 2 days ago

> Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?

Suppose that solar generates only during the day and only when it's not cloudy, and it's cloudy e.g. 10% of the time. Then you're using natural gas at night, but those natural gas plants still exist during the day, so you can also use them on the 10% of days that are cloudy and you're still replacing 90% of the daytime demand.

[–] kulahan 3 days ago

I don't know why this is downvoted. Solar and wind both essentially suck at anything other than baseline throughput. That doesn't mean they're useless, it just means that solar can't be our only solution unless we have, like... 30 breakthroughs tomorrow. We otherwise need something to handle spikes, which are both common and important, as well as periods when there is extended cloud cover even for typically-dark months.

Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.

"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.

[–] crote 3 days ago

Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output. And usually when it is cloudy it also tends to be a bit windy, so solar and wind nicely complement each other.

Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...

[–] dgudkov 3 days ago

> Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output.

I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.

[–] bruce511 3 days ago

Depends on the cloud. Where I live I routinely get 50% generation on a "cloudy" day.

On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.

As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".

[–] andsoitis 3 days ago

> On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%

And you’re still able to power your entire home? What if the rain lasts for a few days, which is pretty common in many places.

[–] bruce511 3 days ago

No, 20% is not sufficient to power the home. I'm still attached to the grid and use grid power even solar is too low.

[–] stephen_g 3 days ago

Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.

I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.

[–] tialaramex 2 days ago

To be fair Australia is very sunny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

It also has relatively wealthy people, living in lots of individual housing units. If you wanted to design a country that's perfect for rooftop solar your imagination might come up with Australia.

That said, Australia ought to be able to run almost everything off solar given how sunny it is, and instead solar is a distant second behind coal for electricity production. So there's plenty of work left to do.

[–] zdragnar 3 days ago

That's every single winter where I live in the US. We don't have a word for it like the Germans do, though, we just call it January.

[–] PaulDavisThe1st 3 days ago

The good news is: you're on a national (or semi-national) grid, and conditions like that are more unusual than they are common across the USA.

[–] kulahan 3 days ago

You want us to transport energy 1500 miles? Cold, dark winters cover enormous swathes of the US - inconveniently, often at similar times. So what - we're turning Florida into a solar park so the rest of the nation can use that while they're dark?

Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.

[–] ZeroGravitas 3 days ago

I used to think the people who took this "America is too incompetent to make the green transition" stance were just downplaying the tech out of some combination of ignorance and weird partisan logic.

But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.

[–] eldaisfish 2 days ago

the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.

If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.

[–] acdha 2 days ago

Serious citation needed that there are week-long stretches of continuous wind-free heavy cloud covering thousand mile stretches of the United States.

Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.

[–] defrost 3 days ago

> You want us to transport energy 1500 miles?

That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...

* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...

[–] hunter-gatherer 3 days ago

Carbon capture makes little sense until fossil fuels have been replaced. I guess there are some Bio char technologies that might change the equation a bit, but watt for watt, you need to replace your carbon emissions first (generally speaking)

[–] saltcured 2 days ago

Yeah, thanks for that. I can only imagine someone reacted as if I am arguing against solar, which I'm not. It's just that you really need storage to phase out the natural gas peaker plants, since they need to deliver on-demand rather than as-available.

And, this gets even worse if you are also replacing baseload plants with solar, since the solar output is more variable than those old plants were, so now you need even more storage capacity to offset those dropouts at the same time you are handling demand peaks.

Sometimes, I think there is some magical thinking going on when people see solar panels work at a house without batteries, and they fail to recognize how much they depend on the grid for stability. If they ran in island mode, they'd quickly understand just how important storage is...

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

A week of low solar and low wind is a yearly or every-couple of years event that you definitely need to solve for a completely renewable grid.

[–] ZeroGravitas 2 days ago

A completely renewable grid is less important than electrifying the low hanging fruit of heating and transport.

Anything below 800g of CO2 (which means basically every current grid) means electrifying is a net win. Even the famously coal heavy South African grid is already past that barrier and even if it wasn't all grids are getting cleaner over time.

A grid that has maxed out wind and solar and then used only coal for 2 weeks would be one of the cleanest grids in the world right now, on par with France or Sweden.

Chasing 100% on a grid to satisfy the complaints of people who are concern trolling isn't smart nor necessary. What you need is bulk cheap electricity to allow you to reduce your heating and transport costs and clean your air at the same time.

[–] adrianN 2 days ago

It looks like we’re pretty much in perfect agreement, but I think it doesn’t hurt to already start planning what to do about the last couple of percent. These are all projects with long time horizons

[–] fpoling 3 days ago

Keeping coal plants around is cheap to cover that. Longer term things like producing ammonia during summer and converting it to electricity in fuel cells will allow to remove needs for fossil fuels completely.

[–] adrianN 3 days ago

I’d keep gas plants around, but anyway, you need to cover that case and can’t just handwave it away.

[–] fpoling 3 days ago

The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.

[–] adrianN 2 days ago

Gas turbines can also run on synthetic methane or hydrogen, which is nice.

[–] awesome_dude 3 days ago

Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy

A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)

[–] kulahan 3 days ago

There are about 90 billion battery solutions - none of them are very efficient, cheap to manufacture, easy to manufacture/acquire materials for, and long-lasting all at the same time.

[–] acdha 2 days ago

Grid-scale sodium batteries are already in production, and there isn’t some kind of magic anti-technology shield which keeps the United States in the 1920s.

When talking about cost, it’s important to remember that solar+batteries are already cheaper and, unlike nuclear, happen on much shorter timescales. I’m not opposed to some nuclear plant starts but those guarantee a couple decades of increased pollution before there’s any chance whatsoever for carbon reduction, whereas solar can come online in a year.

[–] kulahan 2 days ago

Solar panels, of course, are also very dirty to manufacture. Simply bringing something online quickly is not a measure of overall efficiency.

You’re right, though, that nuclear is ALSO only a part of the solution. One day, it will be a major and necessary component of our grid, but we need to start tackling this carbon problem harder, and like… yesterday.

[–] perilunar 2 days ago

> Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy

That's its function, but that does not make any device that stores energy a 'battery'. An electric battery is specifically a battery of electrochemical cells — Franklin invented the term as analogous to an artillery battery (a collection of guns).

Calling every form of stored energy a 'battery' is just dumbing things down for the masses.

[–] awesome_dude 16 hours ago

I gave a specific example (pumped hydro) - that's not electrochemical.

Maybe I did need to dumb it down more if that was missed.

[–] johnea 3 days ago

Typical non-informed incorrect opinion.

The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.

Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.

The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.

In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.

The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.

[–] prawn 3 days ago

How common is it that these industrial/commercial buildings have roof-top solar? If not common, what stops it?

It's quite common in Australia for commercial and residential.

[–] footydude 2 days ago

> How common is it that these industrial/commercial buildings have roof-top solar? If not common, what stops it?

One factor is weight - a lot of low-cost industrial units may well need modifications to the roof to strengthen them to be able to take the additional weight of solar panels.

Certainly where I work (science research facility in the UK) our business has only been able to install roof-top solar on a comparatively small proportion of our total roof space because a large amount of the seemingly viable space would require substantial works to make the roof strong enough for solar.

[–] kulahan 2 days ago

In the US, there is a slowly-growing trend of covering parking lots with solar panels, rather than buildings. You can put up very cheap i-beans + corrugated metal structures with the added benefit of shading cars. It doesn't work everywhere, but in sunny - and especially dry - regions, it's great.

edit: I could see this working well in AUS and USA because we've got lots of space and sun. Might be harder in Europe and northern Asian regions

[–] acdha 2 days ago

It’s becoming common but the current administration has been highly committed to preventing that because it cuts into their fossil fuel donors’ business.

[–] missinglugnut 2 days ago

You're not making any sense. If things worked like you say, the industrial manufacturers would just put solar on their roofs, save a bunch of money, and that'd be the end of the story.

If rooftop solar power were so economically efficient, the manufacturing companies would get far more shareholder money lobbying for rooftop solar than utilities can make lobbying against it. But your conspiracy thinking doesn't account for this.

Heavy machinery uses dramatically more power than the roof space above it can produce. And you can't shut the factory down every time there is a cloud in the sky, so you need a utility hookup that can power the whole factory anyway.

The grid is the technically superior solution. That's why megacorps with capital and lobbying might keep willingly connecting to it.

[–] IAmBroom 2 days ago

Your first paragraph is nothing but an ad hominem. You lost all credibility there.