[cupcakecommons]

You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.

[viraptor]

> they get destroyed by weather

We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?

> get dirty

You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.

> require significant maintenance

Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.

[marcosdumay]

What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is:

> they get destroyed by weather

A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.

But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)

> get dirty

Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.

> require significant maintenance

Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.

But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.

[cupcakecommons]

We were originally discussing offshore wind. These things have to function in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. We don't really fully understand how weather patterns will change over time with climate change. The idea that these factors won't represent serious risks to output over 50-year lifespans is delusional. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. Small scale distributed solar in sunny environments is fine - the rest of this stuff is just a massive waste.

[idiotsecant]

That's not a significant issue. O&M costs are a given and not wildly out of step with traditional generation. If you want to talk about cost effectivness the thing that matters is either a)transmission capacity and interconnects for distributed generation b)storage for centralized generation. As long as you're ok investing in 1 of the 2, distributed generation is great.

[notTooFarGone]

Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad???

Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems

[Paul-Craft]

Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them.

https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...

[M95D]

It doesn't need to be lithium.

Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

[ben_w]

Coal and oil also solve nothing when you can't mine it or drill for it… and those who can, refuse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

[moooo99]

So are we going to ignore Sodium Ion batteries then that are looking to enter mass production?

[Paul-Craft]

Call me when they stop looking.

[bildung]

Here's your wakup call: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/worlds-largest-sodium-io...

[Paul-Craft]

Not even close. This is about global needs.