You just slightly missed the crux of the issue here.
The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.
Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.
It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.
But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently.
PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).
Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention this. Even just phasing out fossil fuels (if we're still serious about that) plus ordinary growth means today's demand is a fraction of what could potentially be fulfilled by additional solar buildout.
It also assumes that there will never be demand for improved solar generation orthogonal to currently-prioritized metrics. As an example, a nice park near my house was clear-cut to install a solar farm a few years ago. I used to enjoy walks under the trees in that park, and seeing the animals that lived there. Perhaps as solar infrastructure becomes more stable and secure, concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts, and there will be a desire to replace older generations of solar panels with ones that somehow can support or integrate more elegantly with nature. And then the next thing. And then the next thing.
Assuming we consume ~20 TW on average, a metre-squared panel kicks out ~40 W on average, and we halve that to account for batteries and other infra... I reckon we're talking about 1 million square kilometres (people will be along in a sec to check my working, but it's just a Fermi estimate).
Call it 10% of the Sahara.
Bear in mind that if we go all-electric, raw energy consumption falls significantly, many panels will be sited on buildings, solar isn't the only renewable, and solar farms aren't ecological deserts - you can graze animals below them.
I'm not saying that that magnitude of solar generation isn't a good thing. I'm saying that the solar farms of 2050 don't necessarily need to be arrays of panels on top of clear-cut land.
Grazing land is often essentially an ecological desert when compared to previous uses. Farms in general, honestly. Actually, this is a good forward example as agricultural expansion goes hand-in-hand with the Anthropocene die-off, but late advances in land use efficiency via fertilizer and other technologies means that even though these lands are super dead we also require less of them per person. What I'm proposing is analogous to even further development, where you're still somehow able to produce the same volume of food while reintroducing ecological diversity to the same land; moving away from traditional monoculture farms to ultra-efficient food forests. I don't know how you'd do it in farming, but it energy generation, it would probably involve engineering equipment to some level of symbiosis with the preexisting environment. Could we someday build literal forests of photovoltaics that support energy generation as well as a diverse natural ecosystem? Maybe. I'm sure we'll try. And that's why, ultimately, my point is that the idea that solar is an economic dead end is incorrect. This is just one potential branch on a tech tree (heh) that isn't anywhere near done growing.
>Traditionally, deserts have been seen as harsh, lifeless landscapes
This is incorrect, depending on the geographic location. Many "deserts" are actually ecologically vibrant, and "greening" them (especially for farming) threatens to destroy a measure of natural diversity.
That said, I think you and the other poster placed emphasis on the wrong part of my post, as my point was less about solar land area coverage as some sort of singular evil, and more about the *opportunity* present in continuing to develop solar technologies so that they impact the environments they're placed in less and less over time. This would mean that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of development, and that further improvements are possible even after reaching a satisfactory level of efficient generation. The energy economy would not fall off a cliff, as some predict. It would simply shift to solving other problems.
You can see an example of this in computer engineering, with Moore's Law's fall-off and the rise of GPU-based innovation.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.
If the average panel lifetime is 25 years, and it takes > 25 years to reach "full capacity" (whatever that might mean or whatever level that is at), then by definition there will be a continuous cycle of panel replacement taking place.
It's not as if we get all the PV installed in 12 months and then it lasts for 25 years ...
The 25 year thing comes from the 25 year warranties - they’re generally warrantied to be at 80% power capability at 25 years. I don’t know the real lifetime, but presumably it’s a lot longer than 25 years. And by that point, maybe we’ll have the deuteriumdollar…
Being mounted on a moving vehicle subjects them to a much more dynamic and hostile environment than having arguably better quality, fixed panels sitting in a dry desert for 25 years. I’m actually impressed that yours lasted 10 years.
Open for debate. They are mounted horizontally on the van, which makes them subject to almost no face-on wind forces at all. The aluminum frames are bolted to the van, but the van structure is metal and likely doesn't move much in terms of distances between bolts other than due to thermal expansion, which is also true of my ground-mount array (in the dry desert :)
There's more vibration on the van, but how the impacts their life compared to the months of daily 30mph+ winds hit the faces/rear of the ground mount array seems hard to tell without a lot of research (which someone may have done).
An interesting prospect is the grids getting smaller. Becoming distributed again.
Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.
When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.
I think one place this could go, a decade or more in our future is that the electricity isn't worth metering but the fact you can have electricity is billed. Think of a typical phone service today. You don't pay to send a text or read Hacker News on your phone, but you do pay for the privilege to be able to do either of those whenever you want.
So I'm imagining instead of spending 40p per day plus 24p per kWh maybe it's £1 per day and usage isn't really metered. A few people would abuse this, but if energy is cheap enough it's barely worth caring.
In the 50's "too cheap to meter" was a saying that made sense because metering was expensive. Computers have made metering cheap.
Your internet/phone analogy is relevant. They are metered, but you aren't billed on usage. Metering is used to monitor for abuse.
Australia is already moving towards the system you envisage. They're going to give you free power between 10AM and 3PM. I bet there's fine print in it similar to internet/TV, some sort of abuse limit.
True but there are 2 technology converges that are happening at the same time cheap energy that is getting cheaper. And automation powered by that energy that also gets cheaper as energy gets cheaper as well as efficiency gains. The current world economic systems and most government systems are unlikely to survive the upheaval that this will cause in the next 15-20 years.
Old panels are continuously being replaced with new panels. This is happening now with a few year old panels. So many free old panels available, because new ones are producing 590W/panel. Over 25 years, there will be a lot more advances, panels that will be printed by textiles, or painted on surfaces, or grown by bacteria.
Very much depends on the rating. A residential panel is something like 65”x40”. A commercial sized panel is something like 80”x40”. The cell size is relatively constant, but the bigger panels are 6x12 cells instead of 6x10. Newer panels have more efficient cells, and so higher power.
Panel manufacturers can also do odder sizes as required. Example: q-cell does a 94x51” panel. This is 6x22 cells, but different sized cells as well.
Most panels are 6x, because that results in an open circuit voltage of just shy of 50V, which is convenient for code compliance.
> That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it
Funny you would say that, Australia is about to have free power for all for a few hours each day. Yep, there really is that much
It probably could have been true if regulations were not written that said if your nuclear power is going to be cheaper than other sources you have to spend on safety features until it's not cheaper.
Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.
Solar plants don’t need much maintenance. The lack of moving parts means mostly it is just mowing the grass. The transmission infrastructure does need maintenance. Batteries have pretty low upkeep too.
And if you live in the right place "mowing the grass" can mean you lease the land for somebody to farm goats or sheep on it and so you get a small extra income.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
No we won't. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted the entire planet to solar today, there would still be new installations tomorrow because energy demand is infinite. There's never enough, we've always used more energy as more energy sources were available.
That hasn’t really been true in the US in recent decades - efficiency improvements and deindustrialization were balancing increasing population. It’s recently started growing again because EVs, heat pumps, and DCs, but even a 3% increase in demand has caused a lot of growing pains.
The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.
Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.