That’s pretty close to the truth, read Brett Christophers: The Price is Wrong - Why capitalism won’t save the planet. It’s hard to make renewable energy a better investment than others because despite the unit cost of solar panels being low, thanks to china, the land cost of building a solar farm where demand is (close to cities) is high, so solar farms end up being built AWAY from where energy is most demanded, which means there are transmission costs for the energy, which means when an entrepeneur is asking for a loan for a solar project he doesn’t even know how much he’ll sell the energy for. It’s also a VERY competitive market and there’s no OPEC-like cartel to bring up prices and therefore profits. That’s why private solar projects are not delivering the scale that is needed for real transition and to the extent that there even are these projects they are 100% depended on state subsidies to de-risk the whole deal for investors so they don’t lose money, it’s not REALLY treated as a state project basically.
In China it is, the author makes clear
yeah, you also have to do a lot of work on the grid itself to be able to take full advantage of solar panels, and there’s no profit in that either.
A dozen tech lizards scrambling papers around trying to figure out a way to turn sunshine into a subscription service
It already exists. There are some services where you rent a portion of a solar farm instead of paying your electricity bill. The way it works is that the energy your solar farm generates gives you credit for the electricity bill, so you usually don’t pay anything
Markets don’t work well with abundance without subsides ??? There’s no downwards price flexibility???
the rate of profit do be falling, wild
all my profits… fallen… like apes in a digital wind
Forget prices going into negative territory. This planet is heading into negative territory
I do wonder if negative/extremely low energy prices is the point where we could/should spin up carbon capture technology.
At the very least we could just have a giant laser beam shooting the free energy (which is essentially captured heat) into space.
At that point simply increase the albedo of earth, it’s cheaper and easier
there’s probably some way to shoot lasers into space that does some kind of interference thing to the incoming light.
Wouldn’t possibly work by nature of light. You can’t replicate the phase of photons from the sun because it’s blackbody radiation, i.e. very much the opposite of monochromatic and coherent.
It’s not really captured heat, though, since the incoming photons are (mostly) not infrared. Solar panels don’t cool off the surrounding area directly; they’re mostly converting visible light into electricity.
Direct air capture is still really hard to do at scale for thermodynamic reasons. The quantity of CO2 in the air is very low (~420 parts per million), which makes it really challenging to extract. It’s much, much more efficient to use the energy we’re harvesting to just avoid emitting additional CO2 than to try to capture it, but that’s hard to monetize. Direct air capture is mostly a grift/pipe dream at this point.
This always get me thinking of Jimmy Carter putting solar panels on the White House, Ronnie Raygun ordering them removed, and no subsequent Democratic president having them reinstalled.
I know, it’s fucking depressing. The Democrats are objectively worse than the Republicans, because at least with the Republicans they’re honest about their villainy. The Democrats, meanwhile, build their entire platform on lying.
What if we farm the solar wind using a giant satellite outside the magnetosphere?
Simpsons did it
They are both kinda right and that’s why there is a need for grid storage for selling that excess during the night.
I’m still more of nuclear guy myself
The time for building nuclear was 30 years ago. They’re pointless now. Renewables are now cheaper (even including storage), and faster to build, and more likely to be community-owned or decentralised. There is just no reason to build anything else.
There is a reason to build nuclear if you actually hate renewables but know that it’s uncool to say that you do, so you shill nuclear to appear hip and cool
Renewables are now cheaper (even including storage)
Source?
There are a lot of factors. But for most of the world, yes, renewables + storage is cheaper than any other option already:
Unsubsidized Solar Remains Most Cost-Efficient Energy Option in US
With the added costs of energy storage, the LCOE for wind rises to $US45-$133/MWh, which is still much cheaper than coal ($69-$168/MWh) and competitive with combined cycle gas ($45-$108/MWh).
Utility-scale solar, meanwhile, is valued at more than half the cost of coal, at an LCOE of between $29-$92/MWh, average $61/MWh. Large-scale solar with storage ranges in LCOE from between $60/MWh and $210/MWh.
The cost of nuclear power, meanwhile, has doubled since hitting a low of $US95/MWh in 2011, to an average of $US182/MWh, or ranging between $US142/MWh and $US222/MWh, in 2024.
Renewable energy, paired with energy storage and transmission is lower cost than coal, gas, and nuclear energy.
https://energyfactcheck.com.au/2025/01/18/are-renewables-more-expensive-than-coal-gas-and-nuclear/
Las Vegas could get 98% of its power from solar+storage at a price of $104/MWh, which is higher than gas but cheaper than new coal or nuclear.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/solarstorage-is-so-much-farther-along
Even in cold, darker places like Sweden:
Nuclear systems require less flexibility capacity than renewable only systems.
A renewable energy system is cheaper than a nuclear based system.
[However] lower flexibility costs do not offset the high investment costs in nuclear energy.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924010882
In Sweden, where nuclear power generated 41% of the annual electricity supply in 2014, the official goal is 100% renewable electricity production by 2040. Therefore, we investigate the cost of a future low-carbon electricity system without nuclear power for Sweden. … Our results show that there are no, or only minor, cost benefits to reinvest in nuclear power plants in Sweden once the old ones are decommissioned.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.03679
The cost of battery storage projects has declined over 90% since 2010. Solar farms became over 20% cheaper just this year.. Conservative estimates put a further 20-50% drop in prices for various renewables + energy storage solutions over the next 10 years..
The race is over in most the world now, even if you could build a nuclear plant in a day. But given how long nuclear takes to build (still averaging over 6 years, many much longer). It’ll be surprising if any nuclear plant started now would be viable anywhere by the time it’s up and running.
Thanks a lot for providing the sources.
I’m a solar energy nerd myself and watching the prices of LiFePO4 batteries over the past 2 years has been astonishing, I wonder what will happen with sodium batteries in the upcoming years. I wasn’t aware of the overall economic maturity of solar+storage as of today, and it’s impressive.
My only argument is: the prices for nuclear in all sources you’ve sent, from what I’ve seen, are in the west. US, Sweden, Denmark… China is planning to build 150GW of nuclear over the next 5 years, and more afterwards. What would be the environmental impact and the cost of Chinese new-gen nuclear when compared with Chinese PV+wind+storage? The data for China is hard to find in English unfortunately.
Given that China is probably always 5+ years ahead of us both in nuclear and renewable generation tech, it’s hard to know…
China has a lot of different terrains, it may be more suitable locations that do make economic sense, it may be to just utilise existing industrial chains to maximise the speed with which they can ramp up energy production, maybe the new-gen nuclear is somehow that much magically better, or it may just be outdated decision making.
Without knowing highly technical chinese, who knows. But to be honest, there’s no reason to think the picture is that drastically different. Probably a complicated combination of all the factors and more.
I agree the onset of stuff like cheap cheap sodium batteries could be further game changers.
yes, sources please
Yeah provided
They are both right and that’s why there is a need for
grid storage for selling that excess during the night.a planned economy without the profit motive so that technology that is effective enough to “drive down electricity prices into the negative territory” is seen as a boon to be utilized instead of an annoyance to be compensated for. This is the realistic option because there is no solution for climate change under capitalism.The “prices going into the negative” is because supplying too much energy to the grid can damage the infrastructure. Grid storage would be thensolution a planned economy comes up with here.
yeah people don’t often realize that electricity is generated on demand. You flick a switch and 50km away instantly some turbine has to work harder for producing it. you can’t store electricity as is, it’s not an liquid being pumped in and out of the grid. Electric grids are a massive balancing act of keeping the capacity constantly at the sweet spot where lights stay on, but also that the substations don’t catch fire. You really can’t wish for the sun to shine brighter or dimmer when there is excess or not enough demand, but you can increase the heat output of an nuclear reactor…
While it’s not really on issue on a smaller scale, but with mass solar/wind/wave/etc. adoption the issue is not just the battery arrays that are needed, it’s the fact that grid infrastructure itself has to be able to cope with huge excesses and potential total starvation of electricity (yeah you can plan around day night-cycles) and the fact that the power might be coming from million different small providers that can be producers or consumers at different times of the day, instead of like a dozen powerplants which supply a city. If you move the coal, gas and oil out and discard nuclear then you have basically no stable baseline power and no reactivity if demand suddenly spikes or production drops (2 ton spinning turbine can resist sudden changes in grid voltage drops) in the grid and it’s all on batteries and the grid needs to be able to handle that since batteries can’t spike their output as high on demand without catching fire. Nuclear is drop in replacement and it lessens that fragility of the grid over mass solar. With SMRs and legal reforming the cost and build time can be brought down. Both of which are kinda artificial issues anyway brought on by the paranoia of Chernobyl and three mile island.
Yep that is true. I meant to refer more to the fact that the MIT twitter account named loss of profit as the primary issue instead of the infrastructure damage.
I worked on industrial solar grid power plants.
The problem with solar is the battery technology hasn’t caught up with what can be harvested from the sun via solar panels. There isn’t a viable way to store it to be available for what the grid demands.
I’m also hesitant to call it a “green” technology when the rare metals required to make the solar panels and batteries make quite a bit of pollution and require slavery mining in Africa.
Nuclear is the way forward 100%
