It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread. That is not to say that these projects should be free of criticism, but anyone who believes these negatives are remotely close to the damage that fossil fuels are doing needs to re-evaluate their world view.
I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman.
China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
Whoa boy. I caught Landman for the first time today because my partner was watching it.
Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.
Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.
I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles.
I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
never heard of this show, I wonder who produces it
oh Paramount
the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS
With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything.
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
Good point. Reality is more nuanced than simple overbuilding and underbuilding. Still, we aren't really still building enough housing and mass transit infrastructure.
That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
> And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental.
If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos.
It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers?
I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.
Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
Those big oil comments are in your head. The comments here, not cheering, are nowhere near parroting any Big Oil talking point. God forbid that we have an actual conversation.
It's kind of bizarre to see the far right and far left circle to the same misguided big oil conclusions, although for different reasons. The right doesn't want their traditional oil/coal industries threatened. The left is kind of... just against the continued growth of technology/industry/humanity.
>It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread.
What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
Oil and gas have used, between drilling and refining, over 7 million acres of land in just the US. Yes, it provides more electricity, but at the cost of destroying the entire planet's biosphere, global warming, etc.
Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.
The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
> Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.
I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.
But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.
At the moment most who are chasing the green agenda are learning that it’s not reliable. Germany for I instance can’t even figure out where their power comes from and their grid is an absolute mess. They are busy destroying their nuclear power plants and coal plants while prices are skyrocketing and reliability is disappearing and systems are failing. The propaganda of the green is winning at the cost of people’s lives.
Really? I don't think I have a dog in this hunt but my judgement of comments is that it's maybe 70/30 (with the 30 being critical in one way or the other) and anyone critical is getting down voted to oblivion.
That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
Fossil fuel could be heading for a big cliff where most countries that currently import a lot of oil/gas will be year on year reducing their imports. China is ahead of the curve here and is already importing less oil year on year. That's likely going to spread. If you extrapolate growth curves trending up for EVs a few years you can draw similar curves for oil demand trending down.
We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.
A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.
Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.
Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).
A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
It's incredibly how common it is these days to see valid criticism dismissed as "X talking points" or "Y dog whistle". I guess that's easier than providing an argument.
Oh, what a weak argument: "you've just fallen for the propaganda".
You might notice comments simply arguing for less energy usage are buried at the bottom too. Have you considered whether you may have fallen for the "green" propaganda? It's so predictable after all.
Two wrongs don't make a right. We look back and curse our ancestors for their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Who is to say future generations won't look back and curse us for destroying all wilderness?
Do you have ANY datapoints or arguments to underpin that renewables "destroy all wilderness". Or even more that they are worse than fossil fuels? This claim - especially in your harsh tone - could need at least some reason.
Ok, I'll bite. What if solar panels turn into breeding grounds with perfect environmental temperatures to create viruses that kill us all? Who is to say the sun won't blow up tomorrow? Why not enumerate all the things that might happen to distract? There is a nice quote going around re a weather scientists who gets asked annually what's it going to be like this year? He's tired, and notes "this year, and every year for the rest of your life is going to be the hottest ever." That's in large part to oil, full stop.
> Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular
Interesting because most of the critiques, especially to electric cars come from boomers. Also to Solar and Wind, the kind of silly criticism like "Why are we filling our barely-arable lands with Solar?!"
Now we'll watch how the European car manufacturers get swallowed by Chinese electrical manufacturers.
It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben.
There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs.
This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year.
The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
Similar to the idea that electric cars are net worse for the environment because some of the materials used to make them. Worse than 20 years of burning gasoline in an ICE car? It's so ridiculous.
The rhetoric around "energy independence" always sounded like it was pointing exactly toward renewables, and it's hard not to see the missed opportunity in hindsight
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
In Ireland all the rooms came with a substantial hole in the wall, mandated in case you decided to put something like a kerosene heater in your room, although the heating was electical. I generally had to block them off to stop the wind whistling through.
One neat thing is that solar/wind farms can be multi-use. You can position panels to provide shade and wind-break to provide micro-climates for plants and animals.
The fact that parking lots in the south of US aren't just covered in those makes no sense at all. Vast expanses of mostly empty pavement, bathed in sun all day? Shaded parking? No?
The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.
Power is quite literally power, in both the physical and political senses. The Chinese know this, and Europe is catching up fast. American private enterprise knows it too.
Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.
Meanwhile the US is using its remaining carbon budget to bomb and burn in one last effort to expand its dying empire. Eventually this system will fall, and the west will realize they wasted all their energy (literally) on non-civilian hardware that needs massive amounts of cheap oil.
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
On the one hand, the geometry is beautiful and almost serene; on the other, it's a reminder that decarbonization at this scale is still an industrial transformation of landscapes
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
Every generation thinks they're building a safer future for their kids, including the boomers. If you want to talk about safety then you need to take sustainability seriously.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
Take too long time and cost.
I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
They are uninhabited by humans currently. They are not uninhabitable as shown by animals and plants living there. And they can also not be called "big parts of the earth" by any stretch of those words.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
At least it's better than sending peasants into the mountains and building solar panels on the flat field that has been growing crops for thousands of years.
In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
I know nothing about the topic.
Although it seems a better alternative than coal or petrol, is it free of side effects for the nature?
I wonder if the heat that would be spread around the atmosphere and back to space can actually gradually serve as a trap for heat?
No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
If you look at the growth rate of renewables it should be pretty clear that coal will not play a major role in the foreseeable future.
Why is it not saying 18% of the needs are being met by renewables? That's exactly what it does
China is far more incentivized to champion renewable considering that they do not have the same access as the US. US is also on a path to quite literally invading other countries to extract crude and other resources. I don’t think China is in a position to do this, yet. If China invades Brunei or arrests Bolkiah, they will face irreversible repercussions.
All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
No, too much Fox "News".
Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.
Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.
It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again.
Oh, and the
I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
oh Paramount
the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS
all running on Oracle (tm)
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
Europe is also at least a decade ahead.
And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
That's two baskets right there.
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.
Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.
That's where long distance interconnects come into play.
I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.
Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.
The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.
I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.
But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.
That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.
A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.
Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.
Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).
A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
You might notice comments simply arguing for less energy usage are buried at the bottom too. Have you considered whether you may have fallen for the "green" propaganda? It's so predictable after all.
Two wrongs don't make a right. We look back and curse our ancestors for their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Who is to say future generations won't look back and curse us for destroying all wilderness?
Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular unless their powers of observation are somewhat limited.
Which is understandable, you don't reach maturity overnight.
Edit: not my downvote btw
> Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular
Interesting because most of the critiques, especially to electric cars come from boomers. Also to Solar and Wind, the kind of silly criticism like "Why are we filling our barely-arable lands with Solar?!"
Now we'll watch how the European car manufacturers get swallowed by Chinese electrical manufacturers.
This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.
wars / empires etc are built on mastering an energy source
the Brits on Coal
the US rose on Oil
China is rising on renewables
my worry is can renewables be quickly brought online to power industry / power hungry Data Centers etc at a reasonable cost
I mean, clearly the answer is yes. The problem is political, not economic.
Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
It happens all the time...
People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.
[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
But no one talks about it because it doesn't provoke the only important narrative: "It's a shame that the US isn't doing that!"
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
Arguably the US is energy independent. It has Texas, Canada and Venezuela.
They never did discover any large oilfields in China despite decades of frantically searching for it.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/energypulse/blog/uk-wind-and-glo... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1489147/uk-offshore-wind...
ps.: Per capita it's also not #1 — Denmark and the Netherlands both have higher offshore wind capacity per person.
https://openinframap.org/#9.12/36.0832/100.4215/A,B,L,P,S
Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
One of the most factually BS statements ever.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattrandolph/2026/01/12/china-d...
(direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e...)
Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.
Even though associated costs exist, a free source is the lowest of its kind you can find.
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
> gigantic waste of space
Good thing China isn’t running out of space
Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
The supply chain for nuclear power, including fuel from mining to waste storage, is not tiny either.
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.
Outside of peak summer it's much more optimal to have a south facing slope actually.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Does this question make any sense at all?
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
What is free of side effects for "nature" ?
https://www.iea.org/countries/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...
All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
China needs power NOW though.