[Aurornis]

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.

Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

[ceejayoz]

> Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions?

They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.

[fp64]

I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.

[ceejayoz]

Finland:

> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...

[engineer_22]

They are buying electricity and storing it as heat and time-arbitrage it to when the heat is needed, they make no mention of the electric power source. In any case, during the depth of winter, when it's needed most, they're still burning carbon. Previous paragraph to your quote:

>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.

Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.

Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/finland/energy-mix

[adgjlsfhk1]

going from burning fuel 12 months of the year to 3 is still a 75% cut in fuel costs and emissions

[jltsiren]

Finland only started building solar recently. Wind is still more cost-effective, if you only consider the cost of generation. But there is almost too much installed wind capacity. If you also consider the value of the generated energy, solar gets ahead, as it correlates less with existing generation.

In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.

[fp64]

That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.

[ceejayoz]

> That's for 5000 people.

And it's quite compact.

> And only covers heat.

Is that not useful?

[fp64]

Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize

[ted_dunning]

It scales up just the way that siloes on farms scale up ... you build more of them.

And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.

[cycomanic]

That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.

[bluefirebrand]

Not necessarily. A large component for solar+storage is using the storage to offset the time that the energy is available. It's not just storing for overproduction

For instance, most places will have peak energy usage in the evening, when everyone gets home from work, starts the laundry, turns up the thermostat and makes dinner and such, kind of all at the same time

If you can store the solar energy at noon and use it at 6pm when everyone has come home from work and started making dinner, then you can prevent a demand peak from ramping up fossil fuel plant

So you aren't necessarily just aiming to store the overproduction, you're using the stored solar when it's more useful

[rwyinuse]

Usually there's either sun or wind. Last year 57% of Finland's electricity generation was from renewables, the rest being largely nuclear, and the electricity costs were among lowest in Europe.

Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.

[kalleboo]

The places that don't have much sun instead tend to have much wind and hydro.

[anukin]

The argument I have generally heard is consistent power output and grid availability 24x7 with solar is harder. So they augment with gas turbines. IMO augmenting it with nuclear is better.

[laurencerowe]

Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.

[ted_dunning]

And even better is to augment it with large scale batteries.

Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.

[hdgvhicv]

Why not just nuclear?

Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.

Why not just gas?

Because it’s too expensive.

[Kon5ole]

>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.

One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.

I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.

[antonvs]

> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.

This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.

[Kon5ole]

>If power generation isn't profitable

Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.

Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.

Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.

I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.

The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.

[ozim]

You can be when you are living in an apartment building and you hear how people who have a house get 0 electric bill or get negative electric bill.

Some people just want the world to burn…

[rgblambda]

It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.

[ozim]

Better solution would be "not being petty asshole" and keeping in mind that in case of problems with power supply homeowners with solar panels might be useful.

[wat10000]

There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.

[PyWoody]

> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.

I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.

It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.

[triceratops]

> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds

I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.

[8note]

solar heating isnt as passive, and requires that the fluid keeps flowing, and all thr plumbing maintenance that goes with that.

a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs

[ted_dunning]

This is an important point. In the 1980's, PV panels extracted 5-10% of the incident solar energy which could be converted to heat at roughly 100% efficiency. Solar thermal collectors collected at 80+% efficiency and could store and return the heat at about that level for a net 70% round trip. That's a lot better than PV, especially if the collector is your entire south-facing facade.

Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.

Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.

[Kaliboy]

The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.

Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.

So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.

This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.

It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.

One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.

With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.

So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.

That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.

I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.

[two_handfuls]

Inertia was an issue, now it's solved with grid-forming batteries that can provide the same inertia a rotating flywheel did.

Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.

Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_

And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5

[kalleboo]

The inertia issue is not some fundamental law of physics, it's just how the DC->AC inverters are commonly programmed, to follow the grid, since that is the easiest way to regulate the grid when non-AC generation is a minority.

The inverters can instead be programmed to form the grid frequency - Australia installed its big battery literally as a much faster way to stabilize grid instability events than spinning up gas peaker plants.

Grids with large amounts of renewables like California are moving toward VPPs (Virtual Power Plants) which are distributed collections of renewables and batteries which are programmed to work in unison to help form the grid, as an easier way to regulate the grid frequency than coordinating each tiny plant separately.

[qmmmur]

Western Australia also has a VPP program that is pretty successful.

[dimitrios1]

I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.

I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.

[rcxdude]

I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.

[HerbManic]

That and the excess amount of farming just to feed cows for beef.

Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.

[ted_dunning]

and I cry again when I see mountains of fly ash from coal burning.

[bryanlarsen]

The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.

[pfdietz]

The solar farm powering BEVs also uses maybe 1/200th the area of the equivalent bioethanol farm powering ICVs.

[mjamesaustin]

Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.

[beambot]

You need to read about agrivoltaics. This is being used to huge effect elsewhere in the world to improve farming & soil. Here's an example from China:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

[teamonkey]

This guide to the UK’s Land Use Framework says that the amount of land required for renewables by 2050 is comparable to the amount of land used by golf courses.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...

Also see the amount of land used for beef and dairy. Before industrial farming, Britain was a rainforest.

[tootie]

Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.

[baby_souffle]

And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.

[vel0city]

> And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.

You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.

[enoint]

Or under the plume of heavy metals from coal. That land, near the transmission infrastructure of a coal plant, is only good for solar farms.

[teamonkey]

Also, when you’re done with the solar farm you simply take the panels off, disassemble the aluminium frame, then you have your field back. Unlike a coal mine.

[ceejayoz]

> use up perfectly usable farmland

It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.

[ted_dunning]

Cutting out the middlemen. Getting rid of the pesky chlorophyl syndicate.

[wolrah]

> A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space.

Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.

Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.

[8note]

on that easy fix - the land under solar panels can still be used for farming or ranching

[pfdietz]

What do you have against farmers using their land as they see fit? Are you against property rights? What other freedoms do you oppose?

[hydrolox]

were you crying when you considered the myriad of negative effects of burning fossil fuels?