The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.
As admitting that solar is now a superior and cost effective means of energy means admitting that the US is no longer top dog.
As empires are built on mastering a source of energy.
the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships.
the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution.
America mastered oil
now the Chinese have Solar.
even in places like Africa etc -- places were the grid was never available for $2k -- you can power your whole house with solar and lithium batteries. Panels are getting cheaper, same as batteries. Once the tipping point is reached for electric vehicles both personal and commercial - transition to fully electric mobility happens
> The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.
I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.
I don’t know if it is “unstoppable” or a “force,” but nepotism is a natural behavior, selected for in humans by kin selection.
Likewise, I think public choice theory would probably argue that corruption is a predictable outcome in politics that has to be constantly guarded against.
> corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature
History suggests it's the other way round. They're awfully prevalent - what is a hereditary monarchy but nepotism - but the value of meritocracy over nepotism enables such better governance that it tends to win handily in proxy or actual conflicts. Similarly, if your society is too corrupt when you go to war you discover that someone has sold the tyres off all your stored vehicles, or suchlike.
You also can't have a complex society without a complex government. This goes all the way back to Qin dynasty vs. "barbarians".
A strong checks and balances without influence of bias, relationships, and politics can be implemented using a 2-way blind system where:
1. decision makers (of sound judgement) are not aware of any identifiable information related to any users on whom the decision will be made, nor of each other.
2. Users are not aware of the decision makers who will decide on them, nor of each other.
Possibly AI can play a role here, but a strong system of checks & balances would be a prerequisite for this.
The justice system would definitely benefit from this.
I don't know how any AI system would not eventually determine that humans are the problem. Sci-fi uses this as a plot numerous times for a reason. What humans are doing is not logical, and better choices can be made if it weren't so damn profitable for some to keep going as is.
Because unlike natural life, which has evolved to be highly competitive and self-interested, we would explicitly set the AI's objectives to always benefit society.
That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.
If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.
There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.
Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.
The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.
(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)
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).
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.
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.
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.
Solaryuan? How does that work? You dont need to buy sun. Just the initial infrastructure. Even if, in a post oil world, china refuses to let you buy the latest panels down the line, a country could just coast on its existing solar infra. Theres no need to use the yuan to sell of buy the energy
I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
No, it's the US dollars circulating globally because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated, giving the US control over the entire global financial system.
> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated
This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
Thankyou for pointing this out. People get very weird about how the petrodollar works, it's more about convenience than force. Like the "eurodollar" of financial clearing. In general people overlook how much America (and to a lesser extent the UK) export "stability as a service". Which becomes jeopardized if the leader is unstable.
> Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?
Both Russia and Iran are heavily sanctioned by the U.S. Neither sells its oil for dollars by default, though either will accept them, of course.
Note, too, that pricing and settlement are different. If I’m Russia selling oil to India, I can “sell” at $50/barrel and accept payment in rupees or rubles. (Indian refineries were not paying Russia dollars for oil.)
What does it mean to lose? Like we can, uh, transfer the technology and build at whatever cost we can build at. Good luck to China charging us more than that cost.
Panels prices bottomed about a year ago below many manufacturer's cash cost, and have gone mostly sideways since.
https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index
If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.
Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.
I know. AIKO has been using copper in their BC cells, and LONGi is making the transition. Many TOPCon cell manufacturers are using silver-coated copper pastes, but full copper metallization is unlikely to happen in the next year or two.
I got panels last year because I’m pretty confident that the majority of the cost of putting panels on my roof is the stuff besides the actual panels. So pricing won’t go down much for getting an actual installer to do it.
Texas, technically, generates more TWh than California. I think a data center boom followed by a bust would help a lot more than what California can do. Unlike in cars, CAs market size or regulations can’t help/hinder other fuel sources as much.
Not only did solar and wind provide the vast majority of power during the day today, as I write this comment coal is neck-and-neck with storage as an energy resource - i.e. power that was saved during the day because it was so sunny.
Coal simply makes no economic sense as a power source for electricity generation anymore. Natural gas is still needed as base load for when renewables are insufficient, but in perhaps the "free market ideological capital" of Texas, the trend towards renewables + storage is simply the economic choice.
Grid-connected PV in Texas has grown between 33% and over 100% every year since 2008, which outpaces the growth of solar in the US in the same timeframe.
California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.
It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.
It doesn't need to. The reality is companies are going to go for whatever the cheapest cost for electricity is, and solar w/ batteries has taken that lead. Capitalism happens to align with a renewable energy green transition, regardless of whatever the US political engine wants. At the end of the day most companies are going to choose profit over political ideology.
Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
You're right but the problem is subsidies change that math. If the US gov subsidizes oil, then the economics of that work out even if solar wins in a free market.
That's true, but also requires that companies believe those subsidies will remain in place over ~20-30 years. Assuming US elections remain fair, that's not going to be the case. By contrast solar / wind subsidies are effective since the bulk of their cost is up-front, so you can generally rely on getting full value out of those subsidies.
Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.
I agree. Subsidies will delay, but they will not change the outcome.
Considering we are racing against CO2 release and the warming planet, I worry that the delay makes a large difference in outcome, not for energy breakdown, but in quality of life for humanity.
Hm, so that seems to kind of obscure how that power actually got generated. Maybe it was all coal, although that seems unlikely. It seems like battery usage is important to measure. But calling it generation seems to obscure something, unless they're double-counting the generation. That's misleading in another way though.
Someone desperately needs to build the largest solar farm on earth, nakedly as a direct affront to China, and call it the "The Grand Trump Sun Energy Complex", with a large statue of him standing at the center of the massive radial field of panels.
The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.
The US manufactures more solar panels now than it ever has before. It just looks small because Chinese solar manufacturing has grown enormously.
First Solar makes panels in the US and is the single largest supplier for utility scale solar farms in the US. If someone wanted to build the world's largest solar farm in the US as a stunt, domestic First Solar capacity alone could do it:
The current single largest solar farm is 15.6 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. It would take a bit more than a year of First Solar domestic manufacturing to surpass that.
China will replace Oil (+Fossil fuel) based ecosystems and applications of energy. Think about all the Oil wealth, but add on energy storage, an unsolved problem of mankind, and all the applications of energy production+storage. We already see this dominance in EVs. Soon, everything else will be replaced. We live in interesting times!
And for a regime claiming to support jobs, sustainable energy provides/requires orders of magnitude more workers than the obsolete, expensive, and dirty coal they are pushing again for no reason.
Moreover, no semi-smart coal miner would wish a coal mining career on their sons. They'd want them to have honest work that is clean and won't likely kill them either quickly in a disaster or slowly by breathing in coal and rock dust all day.
>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution
the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.
Some comment I read I keep coming back to. They (elites) will risk everything to give up nothing.
The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.
It's just so breathtakingly OBVIOUS. And it has been for a decade. Yet we have done nearly nothing.
I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.
The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.
He doesn't care about solar because it does nothing to boost his narcissism. Simple as that. He can't take credit for it. It doesn't boost his image. It's just a simple quiet thing sitting there working.
The Trump administration is intentionally trying to kill solar so that their oil buddies can make money for another 5-10 years.
It’s insane to think that close to 80% of cars in shenzen are electric. I don’t even understand how that works. These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.
It's also worth questioning what wealth and poverty look like in China; the changes in family structure; savings, investment, and credit; and so on. Shenzen is a rich city.
It's quadrupled in population in the last two decades and gone from a manufacturing hub to China's Silicon Valley, so it's probably the least surprising place to be full of EVs.
You refuse to understand the difference between capacity and utilization. That mass of solar still only makes about 1/6th the actual number of watts of power delivered to the grid. Anyone who shows you capacity numbers about energy generation is intentionally lying to you. Capacity factor matters. The capacity factor of nuclear is .9. For Hydro and FF, its .6. For solar its .1. That means 9 watts of solar capacity generates the same amount of power as 1 watt of nuclear capacity or 1.5 watts of Hydro capacity. That's why you keep getting shown capacity instead of utilization (the number that matters).
Parent didn't mention either capacity or utilization? The article itself is mentioning generation. Not sure where you're getting what you're responding to?
The article reports capacity (which doesn't matter) not utilization (which does). Not sure why you are responding about a topic about which you literally don't know the first thing.
I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
And effectively it did: many people are kept in their place by the combined pressure points of debt and employment to stay (barely) afloat.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.
For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.
> if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves
Not at all. The fact that we have practically zero first-hand accounts from the slaves of antiquity speaks volumes to their treatment. My point is on scale (and with that, the institution's effect on the societies that hosted it).
That’s partly true, but it’s also the case that medieval Europe didn’t have any convenient sources of slaves. Conquests had dried up, Europe was effectively surrounded by stronger neighbors, and instead of being able to take their neighbors as slaves many of their neighbors were taking Europeans as slaves.
That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast.
and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
The full preamble of the Mississippi declaration is fascinating, and further shuts down doubters that the civil war wasn't about slavery and racism:
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.
I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.
Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.
People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.
It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.
Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce.
Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.
The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)
It's true the first mills were in the north because they had some good sites, but there are good mill sites throughout the South as well. More tellingly, when the first steam engines in the US were imported from Europe - they could have been just as easily installed in the South.
I think more importantly, steam mills solved for a problem the south did not have. If one was to tell a southerner, I have a technology that will save on labor costs, the southerner's response would have been "what are labor costs?"
You still have to wonder why the south never built factories to compete with the north. They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
I'd venture that the north's earlier industrialization built up experience and supporting infrastructure which made it a dubious business prospect for any southerner that might have considered building a factory, along with the fact that making textiles by manpower alone made less money than picking cotton and exporting it.
> They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
My impression was that there was a lack of fast moving rivers which were suitable for water wheels. You could make some elevation, or build a larger wheel, but that can become prohibitive for the volume needed for a real factory.
It looks like the south does have some suitable rivers, but you wonder why they exported their crops to the north just to buy them back again in their more processed form...that just doesn't make much sense from an economic standpoint. Clearly slavery wasn't a suitable replacement for the type of production work done in the north. It must have been a mix of social factors, combined with the fact that the north specialized in industry early on and you couldn't compete very well with the lack of expertise and lack of industry which supported the local industry in the south.
Anyway this is all just wild speculation. Take it for what you will.
> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.
> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.
One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.
- The difference between Ben Franklin writing about farming in the 1770s and the civil war was that industrialization didn't hit the US until the 1810s/1820s when the first steel mills and steam engines were set up.
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.
Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
The issue (for the masters, and besides any ethical issues) is being a slave master is a very tenuous position, and prone to revolts.
Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.
Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
Yeah roving bands of murdering robots would be a problem in that scenario. We should be able to keep/maintain our current security and rule of law though.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.
I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?
"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"
Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.
Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.
And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
> The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold.
I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
Offshoring generally improves the lives of the people who get the offshored jobs. Usually foreign companies pay more and have better working conditions than the local companies.
Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.
The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.
There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.
If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.
If you own a lot of slaves your life is better than the freemen who own less/none, much less slaves. However society overall could be muca better even if for you personally it is worse
I am quite hopeful. One benchmark that was passed only very recently was Levelized Full System Cost parity in Texas. That is, the total cost of generating electricity via renewables, importantly, including storage and infrastructure costs became equivalent to other options.
I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.
It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.
> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry
Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
Solar is just one technology. Decarbonizing successfully requires still further huge investments in batteries, modular nuclear reactors, CO2 removal, zero-carbon steel production, aviation e-fuels, non-fossil plastics, etc. But yes, hopefully we've unlocked enough economic advantage with just that one technology to get us 90% of the way there just on the basis of economics. (If the current administration doesn't find some way to sabotage it.)
It's just a shame that they didn't end up enjoying the spoils very long. They had very good panels that were researched and produced in Germany but they got completely wiped out by cheap Chinese products
It's a cute ideal, but you can't disentangle government from the energy sector. It's too big.
How do markets build infrastructure as large as an LNG terminal without the government tipping the scales with various guarantees? How do you build a literal coastline of refineries without government clearing the way with permissive regulations? How can you say "let markets figure it out" when the US military is the acquisition department of Halliburton's Iraqi joint venture?
Pretending "markets can figure it out if we just remove government subsidies" is hopelessly naiive. Geopolitics is mostly energy policy.
> you can't disentangle government from the energy sector
Nobody argued as much. My point is the net effect of social pressure on the energy transformation has been costly—financially and politically—for relatively little bang.
Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world.
A whole class of parasites who have made their lives as highwaymen on the densest energy source (outside of uranium) -- that literally comes out of the ground -- have spent at least the last 20 years actively suppressing alternatives.
In some places (see Alberta, Canada), they have literally outlawed renewable developments.
In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative.
There is no "free market" way out of the current situation regardless of how economically viable solar is. In the real world markets and power are intrinsically linked.
> Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world
Yet somehow these opponents have been ham fisted when it comes to opposing the projects which make commercial sense?
> In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative
Agree. But the bans were counterproductive.
> There is no "free market"
You're the only one in this thread who's brought up free markets.
> It's also actually also an emergency
In a sense. I'd underscore, again, that the breathless activism did approximately nothing–the actual gains came from China pursuing national-security interests and market forces driving the deployment and development of solar, wind and batteries.
> the breathless activism did approximately nothing
The subsidies for solar in places like Germany in the 2000's were crucial for the insane solar cost curve we have today. Those subsidies primarily came from "breathless activism" IMO.
Wait, which part is China and which is Europe? Solar didn't win in China because of social pressure, but also not because of market forces. It did win because the CCP made energy independence a political goal.
If we let the markets have their way, Earth becomes unhabitable. Coal and oil plants aren't being shut down. In fact, we have more than ever with additional ones on the way.
It's because "free market" is and always has been a misnomer. Free to ignore externalities, yes. But our shared ecosystem is not seen as a market participant, so it can't charge the true cost of burning hydrocarbons.
We'd also still have industry dumping raw waste directly into our waterways. I'm not so sure that this wouldn't have killed more people faster than unregulated coal/oil plants.
Markets are constructed. It's possible to engineer toward the outcome you want by designing the market in a way that brings it about. Unfortunately, this is considered a socialist (which, in the US, is largely synonymous with "demonic") idea unless you want to change a market in ways that benefit entrenched elites.
Making it illegal (or expensive, via outsized taxes) to burn fossil fuels would ultimately just be another change in the rules of the market -- players will optimize within that space and find the best way to deliver energy and other services within those constraints (assuming enforcement is such that they can't just skirt the laws -- enforcement is also part of the market design).
One can frame this as "incorporating externalities" in order to help marketist ideologues swallow it, but the audience for that is almost entirely composed of people with second homes on islands with tax-cheating-based economies. Normal people are fine with the explanation of "this would have horrible and unpredictable consequences for the world your children are inheriting, so we're making it illegal".
We are at the tail end of 30+ years of successful social awareness efforts, and government regulation and incentivization.
Social awareness and pressure produced the government action necessary to incubate the early markets and seed research. It helped to spur the armies of young researches set about improving solar generation, wind generation, power storage, electric motors, and even LEDs.
Yeah, it's "obvious" now the economics make sense for producers to build wind and solar farms. Or yeah, purchasing LEDs is a no-brainer now why on earth would anyone want to incandescent bulbs; that's boomer tech.
I operate incandescent bulbs because I consider them healthier than LED bulbs, especially the incandescents with neodymium glass that transmits UV light.
(Unlike my LED bulbs though, I will turn an incandescent off every time I step away from it.)
I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.
This perfectly demonstrates the point: Before James Watt came along, neither had the English. Steam was unreliable, broke down a lot, killed people, and was only tolerated because it was the only game in town. This bothered society, so money became available so smart people could sit down and give it a solid theoretical basis.
The greek had plenty of smart people, but nobody bothered to assign them the unreliable steam problem. There are secondary problems like metallurgy, but smart people can work on them or find away around them, too.
England started experimenting with steam because it _could_. Newcomen's atmospheric engine required metalworking that was flat-out impossible before the advent of modern(ish) iron-making processes.
Greeks would have needed to perfect large-scale iron-making. And in England's case, it was itself driven by the need to manufacture things like cannons, anchors, chains, etc.
If you somehow got transported into Greece with a perfect knowledge of steam engines, you first would need to spend several lifetimes researching the iron metallurgy. You would be able to build a toy steam engine out of bronze, maybe, but good quality bulk bronze was expensive enough to be used as currency.
Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.
Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.
What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.
The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".
This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.
Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?
In the US the invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated slavery, which prior to that point had been declining. In the Antebellum south, slavery was profitable, with average return on slaves of about 8 to 10%. Even after slavery was legally abolished, extremely similar social institutions remained for decades (share cropping + institutionalized racism). It wasn't until the 1940s that cotton picking was mechanized.
The North steamrolled the South economically because manufacturing steamrolls agriculture in terms of productivity, but an apples to apples comparison between farmers shows slave owning plantations were economically more productive than free farmers. After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.
Obviously slaves were individually much worse off than if they were free, and society as a whole suffered from the suppression of human capital. Had all those people been free for all that time, imagine what could have been accomplished besides growing more cotton. But for the slave-owner, there was never a point where abolition became economically advantageous, hence why slavery was ended at gunpoint.
> After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.
I wonder how much of that was because of economies of scale (Even if it's forced scale). Plantations are large and have many workers, and can scale without having to worry (to a degree) about retaining workers, since workers are for most intents just machines you invest in and pay to keep up in that system, which allows for easier scaling.
We've seen increasing consolidation of farms into large entities over the centuries, so perhaps this was just a system that made that much, much easier to do.
What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.
With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.
I hope you are right. My fear is that it could allow unrestricted limits to tear down the rest of nature.
Alternatively, it could mean that we would no longer need to do that as a lot of materials that are restricted by energy costs become viable. If energy is almost free you can extract a lot of trace materials from almost anywhere.
My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.
Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.
Which is identical to all the balance sheets today will oil and gas infrastructure and the billions dumped into ICE R&D they were hoping to amortize over the next 30 years.
Identical might be a bit strong. It's only identical if we signed a law that made oil and gas illegal tomorrow. There are definitely parallels, but this is much more of a normal market situation where most things are handled through incentives, not regulation to such an extreme degree we make the common immediately illegal.
Perhaps most importantly, it not being an immediate change allows the entrenched interests time to shift their strategies and portfolios over time to take advantage of the more economically advantageous option. Many people aren't happy with the time frames that generally requires, but they also seem to be very happy with reliable energy and and economy that doesn't collapse overnight and having invested a year or two ago in a car which would become worthless tomorrow.
> belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous
On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.
Not only that, but slavery in the south didn't "end" anywhere near as fast as people think it did. Even when plantations stopped using chains and shooting people for leaving the plantation, they just switched to slightly more subtle ways. Sharecropping, barring them from owning property, running lynch mobs to kill anyone who stepped afoul of the unspoken rules, and not allowing black people into most public spaces.
To this day southern conservatives talk about "state's rights" as being the reason for the civil war. Yeaaaaaah no
Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.
Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.
So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.
If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
Salved are free in neither up front nor ongoing cost, just as industrial equipment is not. It comes down to costs. Industrial equipment that is most costly than slaves seems unlikely to supplant them based on monetary incentives alone, while once it is less costly it's just the social economic momentum which needs to be overcome, which is likely a matter of time.
Importantly, I think there's only so much advancement you can get out of people by investing in economies of scale and iterating on process (and people, as icky as that idea is), while there's a huge amount of advancement to get out of machinery, including moving to whole new categories of machinery (which depending on how far you want to take the "slaved are machines" metaphor is waht a shift away from slaves was in the first place). In that respect maybe what you're noting is just that the shift from slaves to machines was the first in an iterative process which is speeding up over time.
> If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
I think maybe the right was to look at it is if we were able to abolish slavery and keep the same output (which might have required an economic or social system that incentivized farm consolidation for economies of scale that plantations were able to more easily achieve), then yes, we would have terraformed mars by now, but probably just because we happened to be along the tech tree earlier in the timeline.
I have consistently held that solar will replace oil once solar becomes cheap. Literally you cannot beat the market. This is not revisionist. It's simply true. The same thing holds America back from barbarism. Our material wealth is what allows our society. That's why it's important to maintain both
> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna
China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.
So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.
Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime
(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)
Even if global greenhouse gas emissions immediately and permanently stop, climate change won’t. We have many years of further warming ahead of us due to the greenhouse gases already dumped into the atmosphere.
Not diamonds, but olivine. And Dubai isn’t the only one who’d have an interest, anywhere with coastal property that likes to maintain it against erosion is a target for this, admittedly experimental, technique.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?
I read a piece that calculated the economic value of the slaves just before the civil war and compared it with investments in fossil fuels.
It made a convincing case that people would rather start catastrophic wars than just transition to a better economic system, if a few rich people had a lot to lose.
Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.
It's not quite as straightforward as that though. You're also required to pay a large sum up front to get the worker, have to pay for room and board and health for the worker, including children of workers which while they are investments that may eventually pay off, are mostly cost sinks until at least a few years have passed. There's more of a trade-off that might be immediately obvious when you dig into the reality of what it took.
You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them.
You need to do basic medical care.
And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk.
Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision.
Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.
It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.
There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting.
Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.
This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.
There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.
There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?
We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
> We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.
0%? Extremely unlikely. [0] Is your plan as an evil overlord to implement the stack ranking killing the evilest 10% generation after generation for the good of humanity?:)
Also hope you’re going global since other populations will quickly outcompete the docile sub-population if given chance.
Which is funny because we've had an environmentally and economically optimal source of power since the 50s (nuclear) which we deliberately phased out due to panic cycles.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement.
I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.
Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).
At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).
"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".
> I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change.
I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.
Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.
Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]
So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).
We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].
It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.
Kind of a weird headline. It makes it sound like this just happened. But it happened almost 2 years ago. Reading the article is also a bit confusing. I finally figured out they are only referring to utility scale solar and not total solar (utility plus behind the meter)
Presumably we have dammed everything that made sense to (and some that didn't), so solar / wind will keep growing while hydro is unlikely to change (unless it drops).
if this type of data is interesting to you, here’s a site I’ve built that tracks like grid data across the US and Canada: https://www.gridstatus.io/live
We have generation mix, load, and pricing data. Both real time and historical
A direct link would be better, but they mentioned it at the beginning: "On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025."
Does anyone in these comments have any tips for would-be solar farmers or people who are generally interested in being part of building out the future of our grid? I'd like to get my hands dirty. I'm talking about getting into 5-10 MW projects, not solar on a roof.
Trying to cost this out (in a UK context), I found very few press releases give actual cost numbers. This was rather cute though: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sittingbourne/news/you-can-hear... "took over a 5MW site in Bobbing, near Sittingbourne, in December 2023 after raising £176,100 of investments through a crowdfunding campaign"
That is for taking it over from a previous operator, and seems extremely low. More recognizable £1.5k/kW numbers give about £7.5m for that. So unless you're independently wealthy then finance is going to be your #1 consideration. It might actually be easier to do community funding in the UK than the US, provided you structure your investors as creditors and not equity.
#2 consideration is going to be planning rules and the availability of special get-outs for renewables schemes.
#3 is going to be grid connection. In the UK you need permission from OFGEM for large systems. It is also potentially expensive if they make you pay to dig up the road and lay 5MW cabling.
I think the hardest part of building a solar farm is the permitting. Many municipalities are hostile to the idea of converting farmland into solar fields, even with agrovoltaics. There are special interest groups that may come in and try to derail your project by propagandizing the local community against it. "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
If I were doing this I'd be looking for a partner that is already in the business. The politics are a lot more complicated than the technology. It would be very easy to get screwed over if you don't know which palms to grease.
In many states, state law overrides local planning's ability to prevent siting renewables. Check if your state is one of these states if your project size requires it.
> "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
Indeed. The US farms almost 60 million acres for biofuels, the size of the state of Oregon. These arguments do not come from serious people imho. People are simply married to their rural identity and ag cosplay, despite it being wildly inefficient and subsidized by the federal government.
That's probably why it's best to stay small. If you've gotten permits for 10kw project in a backyard or on a Walmart roof, you'll probably have a leg up when you start playing at a scale that brings out the nimbys.
This depends; my UK 3.9kWh installation was permit-exempt, requiring only an MCS certified installer so I could be eligible for feed-in tariffs. The permit regime changes as the schemes get larger.
Is there a big overlap in experience building a 5MW project and a 10-20kw project? The former would involve, I imagine, more of a project manager, fund-raiser, and general contractor role for GP. The latter can be a DIY effort if they are handy and licensed. There's no way anyone is single-handedly installing the panels and inverters for a 5MW project in a reasonable timeframe.
Even the hardware, land acquisition, and permitting stories would be different, right?
I bookmarked this thread because i'm very interested too. If AI takes all teh corporate jobs then I'm going to be a photon farmer. you can get land down in Brewster County Texas for about $1,500/acre but would need to find a spot close to a grid access point. There's some decent reddit discussions on this sort of thing.
I wish it would bring prices down to a point where it would make sense to install on every home. Particularly, in California, costs have increased and the value proposition decreased drastically with NEM3.0. So, the solar industry here has kind of imploded even though it desperately needs to be built out to power my home’s OpenClaws.
The article doesn't mention this, but I assume part of this is because the US is actively dismantling hydro power by removing dams. It turns out what while hydro power is "green" in terms of not polluting, it's still quite harmful to the environment because of animals like salmon that need to be able to traverse rivers and the rest of the ecosystem that depends on them.
I wonder why existing hydro isn't utilized to it's potential. For instance, the Grand Coulee Dam has the highest capacity of any power station in the US of almost 7 MW but usually puts out about a third of that.
Niagra falls doesn't run at full capacity because it takes away from the attraction of the falls themselves, and tourism is important there. They turn up capacity after hours, and the falls slow down.
Not only that, they use the gravitational potential of the falls to store massive amounts of energy when there's a surplus. Way cheaper to hold or even pump the water back up to the reservoir at the top than build lithium batteries. So yeah, as a local, can confirm they turn Niagara Falls (partially) off at night. Thanks to the Falls and several nuclear plants on Lake Ontario, Upstate NY and Southern Ontario have some of the lowest carbon electricity in the countries. Quebec is even better with basically all of their power coming from hydro.
The Ginna nuclear plant is the second oldest in the US and is on a license extension that expires in three years. There is nothing to replace that capacity. Western NY is going to see significant price hikes because of this short-sightedness.
Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam is currently at 23.6% of capacity.
Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is currently at 29.7% of capacity.
Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.
What do you think is happening to the water not being utilized in the production of power? I assumed it's still being run downstream, just not through the power producing turbines.
I'd expect there's not a big effect on the ultimate amount of water being released downstream either way.
Looking at the data for lake that goes through the dam, it seems like they keep it at the same level. So it probably CAN make 7MW with more flow, but generally only flows at a state that puts out 2.
From that https://youtu.be/jvnaiHFT6nQ is a visualization of the water releases for the river to allow the water to get to the right dam for the anticipated power use.
Vogtle won't stay the most expensive. My idiotic government (Ontario, Canada) is committing to building a new nuclear plant. $400 billion for 10GW, and that's before the inevitable delays and cost overruns. Maybe we'll break the $100,000 per kW mark!
One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway.
It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
> One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?)
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
> At scale no group is against its own personal interests.
Of course they are. That's the whole point of scapegoating: convincing people that their problems are caused by another group while actually working against their interests.
Yeah, I think the fact they are willing to dance to any new tune under Trump gives away the game completely. Whether it will make any difference to the audience is something I've stopped hoping about.
> It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality.
one of the few good things Rick Perry did for TX was upgrade the grid so West Texas wind power can reach the main cities. Once West TX showed renewables could make a profit then there's not much anyone, left or right, could do to stop it. The lobbyists made sure of that.
Southwest Texas, where all the fracking took place, also turns out to be good for solar. It's very flat, sunny, and has pretty stable weather. I guess the grid is beefed up and accessible in that region because of the oil/gas industry, I've seen solar farms out there that are so big it's hard to describe. Imagine seeing a shimmering blue that looks like a lake on the desert horizon but then you get to it and it's just miles of solar panels. Again, the moment solar turned a profit there was no stopping it.
I suspect it's a left vs right issue because the right is the cheerleader of the military industrial complex, which is only justified by protecting oil interests. If oil becomes a curiosity useful for making certain consumer products and little else, the military industrial complex is oversized by any metric, hence the right is against that.
Or to oversimplify even more: it's the Bush dynasty's fault.
Yea I wonder how that battery capacity graph will look like post January 2026, since Texas's SB388 specifically excludes batteries from it's dispatchable power generation requirements. That doesn't necessarily prevent batteries storage from being constructed, but it does tilt the field pretty heavily in favor of natural gas.
It became left vs right because the interests of the rich have an easier time exploiting the right wing's vulnerability to fusion identity. The right wing is defined by a collective appreciation for hierarchies and conformity.
A lot of folks are spreading the message 'it's not right vs left but up vs down when in reality its both.
I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
It's funny, there was meme-like behavior a few years ago where anti-wind advocates would say "they're tearing down the wind farms before their end of life, like only 15 years in! Clearly wind doesn't work at all!"
And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.
Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
Biggest take away - 90 million acres in the US go to corn/ethanol production.
31 acres of corn for ethanol to match the energy production of just 1 acre of solar panels.
Revenue could be 3-4x that of corn production.
Get ready for rise of the photon farmers.
That entire talk didn't once mention the phrase "energy density" which is the real reason we rely so heavily on hydrocarbons.
Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.
And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].
It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.
There’s plenty of diesel available to us that doesn’t require stabilizing an authoritarian Central American nation and rebuilding their oil industry first.
> We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone.
Edit for ratelimiting:
> You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
No. I was simply saying the oil is useful in the military-industrial complex, and it does have value. I've said this twice already. I cannot say if this value will be realized, and for the third time, I don't condone it.
> I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
> The gamble is a long game, with no guarantee of success. Returning Venezuela’s crude production to 3m barrels of oil a day would require 16 years of work and investment totalling $185bn (£137bn), according to figures from Rystad Energy, a global consultancy.
> At least $30-35bn of international capital would need to be committed in the next two to three years to make this scenario plausible, Rystad said. “This could only be financed by international oil companies, which will consider investments in Venezuela only if they have full confidence in the stability of the country’s systems and its investment climate for international oil and gas players,” it added.
I think Venezuela and Iran are more about restricting the oil to China in case of a conflict rather than providing energy for the US, although getting ahead of an anticipated demand increase from AI data centers is probably a contributing motivation.
I don't think interdicting Venezuelan oil in a US/China conflict would be too much of a challenge for the US, given... geography. It certainly doesn't require us to control the country or its oil industry.
Transatlantic shipping also. Planes require highly refined fuel though, while ships can burn most anything flammable, even really crappy biofuels. Hardly anything is worse than heavy fuel oil.
He has a whole video[0] on the difference between energy and electricity, so he understands it. Maybe there's some disconnect between the video and your interpretation.
That doesn't leave much left when you look at the energy flow once you remove domestic, commercial and transportation usage and replace it with electricity. A tiny amount left for plane s(and reducing per flight as planes get more efficent and battery planes start coming to market), and industrial gas usage.
Yeah I watched this a week or so ago and had a similar issue.
I'm super optimistic about green energy and in favor of expanding it.
But also acutely aware it's barely putting a dent on energy use despite year-on-year record levels of capacity install (>90% of new capacity is green), which far exceeds expert expectations every single year. Non-renewables keep growing, forecasts and ambitions were cut by the Trump admin, and it is expected that the latest economic revolution's (AI) main bottleneck is going to be energy by the end of the year.
We have essentially blown past the paris accord thresholds (we've seen months of +1.5c temperature, which was the limit we envisioned in 2015) and despite renewables far exceeding expectations, they completely fell short of what is necessary pre-2023. Post-2023 you have Trump derailing renewables wherever he can and AI increasing demand even further.
It really looks pretty hopeless and frankly it's sad that there is no real conversation about this, which seems to be an existential question for the generation living in 2100 and beyond.
You're also now getting to the point that adding new capacity is increasing the amount of renewable energy that is being curtailed (i.e. thrown away), meaning while renewables get cheaper over time, the rate of things getting cheaper will slow down as renewables must be increasingly paired with storage investments (which are also getting cheaper but introduce additional cost).
For example, sunny Cyprus curtailed 13%, 29% and 49% (!!) of its solar generation in 2023 to 2025 respectively. Yes last year half of the solar power that was produced, was thrown away, because of a lack of demand-supply balancing. Cyprus is uniquely poorly positioned (high solar potential, small country with a single small timezone, no interconnectors to offload surplus to other countries, no storage facilities etc) but it's still a sign of things to come. Further generation will increasingly need to be paired with significant storage, or it's partially wasted.
> While the Trump administration has been hostile to renewable energy, there’s only so much it can do to fight the economics. A recent analysis of planned projects indicates that the US will see another 43 GW of solar capacity added in 2026—far more than the 27 GW added in 2025. That will be joined by 12 GW of wind power, with over 10 percent of that coming from two of the offshore wind projects that the administration has repeatedly failed to block. The largest wind farm yet built in the US, a 3.6 GW monster in New Mexico, is also expected to begin operations in 2026.
Hopecore. Onward. The horrors persist, but so do we.
Those offshore wind farms are getting completed mostly because they were so deep into development when Trump tried to cancel them, with a ton of sunk costs. So the companies were able to make the decision to go forward because the extra costs of delays and lawsuits were still cheaper than abandoning the build entirely.
Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.
Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.
I hear you, I'm just saying we keep grinding forward. This admin has less than 3 years to go. Nothing stops this freight train, even if they try to slow it down. You can't fix stupid, you can just keep turning the gears to grind it down.
> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.
As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:
> Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. Vote better next time.
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, and a representative legislature 50 years before 1919. The Kaiser in many ways was more limited in power than the President of the United States.
Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.
How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff.
FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).
there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not, there are just utilities and _relative_ satisfaction. you want to get the most satisfaction possible from the options you have.
What does what look like? Approval voting? The unacceptable (usually extreme) candidates fail to get votes and so get booted out of office, with their places taken by more moderate, common-sense candidates.
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design.
They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own.
This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.
I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.
"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained.
But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.
Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.
The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.
That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.
Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.
Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.
Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.
Sure, it's morphed from the original in various ways .. but perhaps not substantially enough to protect it from being gamed.
Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.
The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.
The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.
I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.
You make great points, and I can only recommend reducing your exposure to the US and its choices to the best of your ability. I invest to get exposure to companies outside of the US now, not inside. I invest in renewable energy funds in Europe (partly to get citizenship, but also to contribute towards the energy transition there). I intend to leave tech soon to move into clean tech finance. The direction and trajectories are clear, to ignore them would simply be out of emotion.
Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.
Having grown up in the US, and been very proud of it despite some egregious mistakes that happened when I was of voting age that I could not stop (e.g. Iraq War), it's very hard to bet against the US. And in the past it's always been a bad idea. But you make a very compelling argument, and the returns on the US vs. international stock markets over the past year make a very objective argument that I'm investing in the wrong places.
I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
We win or we learn. I thought I was a proud American too, that these were my people. Turns out, the US is just an exploitation engine with a God/control complex attempting to bully its way to remain in its position as a superpower while neglecting everything a superpower needs to be one, for profits of those who stand to gain. It is not great because it is great, it is marketing and PR of a paper tiger that has been coasting on trust for decades while rotting from the inside. These are not my people. I no longer am invested in its outcome, but I understand others my have differing opinions. I still care about good people, and have constrained my attention scope to only those people, versus entire nation states. I focus my attention to context where problems want to be solved, not just say they are desired to be solved as a diversion strategy ("purpose of the system is what it does"). Appreciate the conversation as always. Life is short, time is non renewable, spend it wisely.
It's incredible to me that California's primary generation source is cyclical solar — which it primarily offloads to PNW [0], who offsets any missing California solar with its MASSIVE Columbia River Hydro.
Essentially co-dependant renewables, the entirety of West Coast through Colorado balancing primarily between solar and hydro (and natgas peakers). Nothing like Québec (¡hydro!), but still something.
If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits" [i.e. not having to follow federal regulations], they could be sloshing their primarily wind-derived kWHs into an even more-beautiful grid of flowing renewables.
Instead, 10-year winter storms risk hundreds dead and billion$ lo$t.
----
TVA is in planning stages for its second massive pump-storage facility — but Texas is probably wiser in its nascent battery storage investment [1], instead. TVA's Racoon Mountain Pumphouse is definitely impressive, but with all the upcoming "depleted" car batteries being reconditioned into the stationary electric storage market... water power storage is probably the more environmentally-damaging method (definitely more expensive?).
My layperson recommendations to industry [I'm blue-collar, electrician]: reduce coal, increase nuclear; increase micro battery storage (e.g. see Chattanooga's EPB implementations); maintain but stop building dams/pumped storage.
Solar/wind/nuclear/nat.gas will be able to run everything once we have enough battery storage to handle daily peaks. In a few more years we will be entirely able to remove our dependance from toxic coal [2]
As a fifth-generation former Texan, I understand "separatist mentality." ERCOT's buy/sell market is perhaps also the most purely capitalistic marketplace in existance (and among least-regulated, in first-world); for these reasons, winter-proofing funding is terrible and outages likely when the system is stressed (e.g. approximately every decade Texas loses power during winter storms) — which is also when generating profits are maximized (orders of magnitude increases).
Certain deregulated-market Texans are still paying off powerbills from years-old storms, a few cold days of billing often exceeding the rest of the year's usage.
One benefit of the previous Texas winter disaster is that the highest MWH fee was reduced from $9000/per to $3k/p [normal would be ~$30/p].
In my personal opinion the winterization of LNG lines is still not enough for the next major storm (the cause of previous two decade storms was lack of adequate heat-tracing along pipelines — not windmills [Hotwheels' deception]). This has been discussed in every post-disaster report, since the 1980s. Private grid operators see little incentive to prepare for these storms, particularly since they make so much money when the grid is stressed (just how it's set up).
Instead of the stupidity of isolation, Texas could easily amalgamate its resources with the entire rest of Lower 48 USA, and not have to spend nearly as much prepping for emergency gas lines (instead: buy power from somewhere else).
I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?
Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?
How big of an install are you looking to do? I just did a ground mount install on my property. (4kw panels, 5kwh battery) If you are good with your hands, and can follow instructions then I would recommend you do the work your self. The actual installation of the panels and battery are close to plug n play. The cost of an electrician can easily double the project costs for small projects.
For the panels I did whatever was cheapest on signature solar. For batteries and inverter I did eco-worthy. (eBay for that, they run sales pretty often) in total is was $1000 for the panels (that included delivery) and around $1200 for the battery and inverter. If you have a truck then you might be able to find cheaper panels locally.
On YouTube check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He is a certified electrician and publishes part lists and plans that are easy to follow.
tesla isn't great value any more. For a while powerwalls were the shit And the powerwall three is nice, with direct DC charging as well as islanding.
But, only 13kwh still, and internet dependency, and very expensive.
I currently have enphase micro inverters and a power wall 2. It was the right mix at the time.
But, if you have the space, which I think you do, An insulated shed for a 19" rack, and choose any one of the many battery unit makers. Its about $200 per kwh now (in UK prices, I'm not sure what tarrifs are doing for you)
then get a frame for your solar (or build a barn and roof it with solar, its cheaper than 12mm plywood at the moment.)
Have micro inverters, they are more expensive, but solid state, less likely to catch fire, do MPPT better, and are not a single point of failure.
You'll need backup for when solar doesn't cover your daily needs, so either grid or some other power source.
>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries,
>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?
Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over many years to not incur non-starter level costs.
You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.
A few things that I've needed to deal with in my off grid setup:
I like the MidNite solar controllers.
LiFePO4 batteries are great, with a few caveats:
- you must use batteries from the same batch, ie you can't upgrade capacity piecemeal, to avoid degrading the new ones
- cable lengths are important because even small differences in resistive losses between batteries can mean that one battery is doing more charging / discharging
- you can't charge below 0\*C, which I'm assuming could be a problem in New England
Not being able to charge below freezing shouldn't be a problem if you keep the batteries indoors. Is there a reason why you wouldn't? Fire concerns? Or is it just a space issue?
Yes, sorry, I was in a rush and didn't explain enough. For our usage, the cabin isn't occupied during the winter, and can drop below 0*C occasionally. The solar system is turned off though, so we don't worry about it.
If you're permanently there, it shouldn't be a concern. Sounds like modern BMS can disable charging at low temperatures so maybe not a worry for you at all if you're buying new batteries.
I've found lots of communities online on both reddit and facebook for solar DIY and there's some youtubers out there that talk about what you need for this and do reviews of different batteries/inverters/panels.
From what I've heard Tesla has a high cost/energy storage rate and you'd be better of going with something else (even if you have a tesla) but it would boil down to are you wanting to set this up yourself or hire a professional to do all the wiring.
If you are planning to get a Tesla car with PowerShare (it's slowly expanding to the Model Y and other vehicles) then you only really need one Powerwall 3, because the car when charged acts as ~7+ powerwalls worth of backup.
That would be around 30kwh per day so probably not, but you could get close.
Assuming you're in the US, new solar modules go for about $0.28/watt.
If you dump the entire $1k into just modules, that will get you about 3.5kW of panels. Which will probably hit your target on sunny days during the summer.
But that doesn't include inverters if you want to do a grid tie, or batteries if you don't, or wiring, or whatever you're going to mount the panels on.
$1,000 is definitely too ambitious for that much energy. Even just the charging plug for the car is going to take a sizeable bite out of that.
Another way to think about this is that $1,000 is about 20 tanks of gas, assuming you get 400 miles per tank that's 8,000 miles, which is less than a year of driving for the average American. You can increase your budget and still come out way ahead.
The other consideration is that this scheme only works if you only drive at night, otherwise you'll need a battery to store that power while your car is out and about during the day, or you'll need to grid tie and use the grid as your battery.
Best bet is probably a 240v inverter, ground mounted used panels (can often be found ridiculously cheap)and a Docan or similar battery pack. 240v inverters made for the US tend to be pricier but you may be able to get an EU model to work. 120v won't be able to recharge 100mi/day. If you're in the US $1000 is prob not enough though
Hydroelectric generation varies a lot annually due to naturally varying precipitation. In the 1990s, hydroelectric generation reached a maximum in 1997 with 356 TWh (this was also the all-time peak) and a minimum in 1992 with 253 TWh:
In 2025, hydroelectric power generation was 247 terawatt hours. Utility scale solar generation was 295 terawatt hours. Estimated small scale (e.g. rooftop) solar generation was 93 terawatt hours. Combined, that would bring solar generation to 383 terawatt hours for the year.
Solar generation is now higher than hydroelectric generation ever was in the US, but it's also true that hydroelectric generation is lower in recent years. The Ars Technica article focused on the utility scale solar generation. Counting that portion alone, solar generation has yet to surpass hydro's 1997 record of 356 TWh.
There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids.
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
Then why has both global [0] and US [1] consumption been rising year-over-year for the last few years and projected to continue to rise [2]?
All those articles you're posting about short term changes in the dynamics of the oil market (except China, which is remains a net energy importer only because of oil, so they have a strong strategic reason to reduce oil depdence, though they still use quite a bit[3]).
Btw I'm not citing these things because I'm a big supporter of hydrocarbons or against green energy (which will continue to grow with or without boosters, since there is a real demand for that energy), but more so a realist pointing out that we are absolutely not making any progress in reducing our global need for hydrocarbons.
That's like asking "why is the train still moving even though the brakes are on"?
Not very long ago not only was consumption increasing every year, it was increasing at an increasing rate every year. And that increasing rate was itself increasing not so much time before that. We've reversed the 3rd derivate, and we've reversed the 2nd derivative. If the 2nd derivative is negative for sufficient time, the 1st derivative will itself go negative. Looks like it'll happen this year, but the year's not over yet.
The first derivative is consumption. The 0th derivative is amount of carbon in the air. For that to go down would require a carbon negative economy which I don't have much hope for.
It's more like renewables reducing velocity of increase in oil demand (for now). A few more pieces really need to come together, most oil displacement is EV and storage which is infrastructure problem.
Apart from PRC EV displacing 1mbd in oil. The other unmentioned stat PRC annual solar production, assume 30 year lifespan displaces about annual global oil consumption, i.e. 100mbd per day worth of oil. Their total solar output is 2x, what they produce, i.e. they produce enough solar to replace global oilm lng and a big chunk of coal in 10-15 years at full capacity. Storage hasn't caught up, true oil displacement depends on what storage lag will be, but likely short/medium term, not long term.
As for actual oil use, notice how PRC hammering EVs but still importing high % of oil, that's ongoing strategic reserver SPR and petchem play, i.e. even though they'll use less oil, they plan to store more (to mediate prices), and convert more into petchem products. So future is world where cheap renewables will displace oil from transportation to industr... because lots of energy = more industry = increase demand for fossil inputs. Which could mean less/same/more oil demand, unhelpful, I know.
Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
In several countries their freight trains are electric today. Trucks can be electric too, and a lot of shipping needn't run on fossil fuels although we're further off widespread commercial offerings than we are for trains or trucks which you can just buy today.
The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline.
I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.
Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest.
It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.
"Natural" Oil is literally finite, we're currently burning everything which died over millions of years, when we say it isn't "renewable" that's not some vague idea about the planet not overheating (though to be sure if we heat the planet up and make it uninhabitable that would suck for us) but that literally it's running out.
So "who is gonna pay for it" is everybody, eventually.
Whether we need them will be a function if they are financially sustainable. No profit, and they will close (as is the case with the Valero Benicia refinery in Northern California, shuttering April 2026). That is the linchpin to push fossil fuels to failure faster, find economically vulnerable and/or unsustainable fossil infrastructure and push it to failure (fossil supply chain death spiral). Because if no one will pay for it, it will not continue to exist, and the demand base to spread fixed costs across will only shrink into the future, pushing prices to unaffordability compared to non fossil alternatives.
India has effectively electrified almost all of its rail transit. USA or other countries do not need to electrify all lines and the long tail is too long but even the major ones can bring in big benefits. No need to even get China in this equation.
Trains are one of the easiest forms of transport to electrify. Yes, the US is going to drag its heels on doing so, but the rest of the world is already moving on.
Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.
Approximately 40% of global maritime trade by volume consists of transporting fossil fuels [1] [2], which will be less necessary as renewables and storage scale globally, replacing this consumption and the transportation needed.
The US currently spends $1B/year on climate change related weather disasters. Waiting is not affordable nor sustainable. Gas cars already get a free ride by not paying for their externalities, the true price of gas, if externalities were to be priced in, would be closer to ~$8/gallon (some estimates are as high as $12/gallon, but I have specified the lower bound to be conservative in this context). The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to remediate harm incurred by not getting off of fossil fuels sooner. It is, simply put, stealing from the future.
> Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
We could subsidize electric car purchases and manufacturing, both vehicles and batteries. We could allow excellent, affordable Chinese EVs into the US to force US domestic legacy auto to compete on quality and prices (instead of protecting their profits). We could remove fossil fuel subsidies (~$760B/annually in the US) and direct those resources to speed electrification, low carbon generation, storage, and transmission (as China is doing, and becoming the world's first electrostate). But we don't, and those who are upset about inflation should take it up with those squeezing them for profits. The US could've made better policy, it was a choice to regress towards supporting combustion vehicles to prioritize those profits. Elections have consequences. If one doesn't believe in climate change or using policy to encourage electrification while reducing the immense subsidies provided to fossil fuels, certainly, one might disagree with this. That's a mental model issue, not a data and facts issue.
This isn't a good thing unless it's paired with storage and transmission upgrades. Every time this kind of story posts I make this same comment and am met with the same probably well-meaning but ignorant responses. Solar generation is easy and cheap and simple. Actually getting that power where it needs to be, when it needs to be there is complex and expensive. You either need to store it or you need to transmit it very long distances, neither of which we can do effectively right now. Most of California routinely goes into negative power pricing - this is not the mark of a healthy system, it represents a massive inefficiency and destabilizing factor.
We need to pressure politicians to subsidize pump storage powerplants and massive transmission system upgrades (which means being ok with permitting new transmission lines) it's simply impossible to continue increasing the solar on the grid otherwise, we are rapidly approaching instability.
That 'crazy' amount is not even scratching the surface of the surface of what we would need for a high-solar grid, let alone a majority solar grid. Not even within an order of magnitude. You don't have to take my word for it, the CAISO literally provides the data.
How much more do we need? 2x the capacity? 5x? 10x? The state has added a ridiculous amount of battery over the last couple years so it doesn't seem intractable
I remember looking at CAISO's graphs a few years ago and when the sun goes down we were basically completely dependent on imports and natty gas, especially for scaling up to demand around 6-7pm. Looking at today's graph, batteries were actually our top electricity source for a while around peak electricity time. Natty has been able to stay pretty flat, and even now its neck and neck with batteries
Happy to be a 5 year self generation participant contributing to these numbers. Given the very recent winter storms along the East Coast, that still has people without grid power at this very moment, such a residential generate and store system should be an eye opener to those impacted at times of greatest need. My own system was still generating during the storm as many erroneously believe the sun must be fully exposed to move electrons, nope.
I commented here in a recent HN energy post about my surrounding jurisdictions and the exploding utility costs per PJM that literally have governments suing each other. Just today one of those local jurisdictions announced a utility bill financial credit incentive for residents to attend a meeting to learn about what some already know intimately. Link is paywalled of course.
We are witnessing the accelerated adoption of local generation and storage driven by the economic costs of energy that has been directly and indirectly subsidized yet consumption is certainly not equal. As more and more move to self generate and store, per the meetings suggestion, the negative feedback loop is already in motion rising costs even more for those dependent on a centralized system.
For those that can see the light and where it is going; invest accordingly.
I was very disappointed to see the little 8% solar. I see that methane isn't budging. if a legacy industry is politically powerful enough, they can absolutely maintain a backwards situation.
Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The USA of yesteryear would have done this already and more. Sure other sources are required, but honestly we humans have to advance beyond burning dead things for fuel.
Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
As the Technology Connections dude highlighted, yearly, there are about 50 000 square miles used for ethanol fuel cultivation. We do much bigger and less efficient things for fuel. Distributing this all over the country seems much less pipe dreamy than you assert.
Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.
I trillion is going to dispersal in the AI black hole in the next couple years (in the US), I wish the same money were invested in the clean energy instead.
What is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.
Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
Or alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere
There are 13,000 square miles of dedicated parking lots in the United States. Covering these gets you a double-whammy of keeping heat out of the ground and generating power.
I mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
It bothers me that you attribute this to Elon Musk. This has been obvious to everyone for 75 years or more. The lecturer in my freshman thermodynamics class mentioned it, 35 years ago. In 1999, NREL scientists writing in the journal Science under the title "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future" made the specific claim about 10000 square miles.
Thank you. I was not aware of prior references especially that it could be done with 10K square miles, until media reports of Elon's speech at Davos recently.
The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.
As admitting that solar is now a superior and cost effective means of energy means admitting that the US is no longer top dog.
As empires are built on mastering a source of energy.
the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships.
the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution.
America mastered oil
now the Chinese have Solar.
even in places like Africa etc -- places were the grid was never available for $2k -- you can power your whole house with solar and lithium batteries. Panels are getting cheaper, same as batteries. Once the tipping point is reached for electric vehicles both personal and commercial - transition to fully electric mobility happens
> The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.
I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.
I have a theory that corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature.
Advanced governments only force corruption to distribute and obfuscate.
I think this is why there appears to be some correlation between unpopular behavior and financial success.
Government essentially erects artificial barriers to entry on behalf of the incumbent businesses that fund it.
I don’t know if it is “unstoppable” or a “force,” but nepotism is a natural behavior, selected for in humans by kin selection.
Likewise, I think public choice theory would probably argue that corruption is a predictable outcome in politics that has to be constantly guarded against.
> corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature
History suggests it's the other way round. They're awfully prevalent - what is a hereditary monarchy but nepotism - but the value of meritocracy over nepotism enables such better governance that it tends to win handily in proxy or actual conflicts. Similarly, if your society is too corrupt when you go to war you discover that someone has sold the tyres off all your stored vehicles, or suchlike.
You also can't have a complex society without a complex government. This goes all the way back to Qin dynasty vs. "barbarians".
That's why I see AI (with a clear set of provided objectives and guidelines, i.e., a constitution) as the future of government.
As dystopian as that sounds, it's the only way I see to truly rid ourselves of corruption.
This is an incomplete thought.
A strong checks and balances without influence of bias, relationships, and politics can be implemented using a 2-way blind system where:
1. decision makers (of sound judgement) are not aware of any identifiable information related to any users on whom the decision will be made, nor of each other.
2. Users are not aware of the decision makers who will decide on them, nor of each other.
Possibly AI can play a role here, but a strong system of checks & balances would be a prerequisite for this.
The justice system would definitely benefit from this.
I don't know how any AI system would not eventually determine that humans are the problem. Sci-fi uses this as a plot numerous times for a reason. What humans are doing is not logical, and better choices can be made if it weren't so damn profitable for some to keep going as is.
Why would AI at that scale not have the exact corruptible inclination humans have?
Because unlike natural life, which has evolved to be highly competitive and self-interested, we would explicitly set the AI's objectives to always benefit society.
And why would the people in power be willing to do that?
That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.
If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.
It such obvious corruption. Trump ordered the pentagon to buy coal power specifically.
The crazy thing is coal mining is 40,000 jobs. I have never seen such a tiny industry given such preferential/oversized treatment.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001
Lyft is 10% of the size of big coal and Amazon is over 20x larger.
Meanwhile the areas where the coal jobs used to exist (or still do) just had their food stamps removed or reduced. It's such a charade.
There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.
And that is by design. There is a reason why people get food stamps and not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.
> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.
Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.
The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.
I suppose you’re right. Now that you mention it, are food stamps similarly inflationary to having 1000 dollars deposited into their bank account?
I doubt they make any inflation in the sense "more dollars chasing fewer goods"
SNAP etc makes the base-load revenue of many rural grocery stores.
The food is going to be produced, and scale is better.
I work with disabled SNAP recipients and it's never been easy.
$1000 is um, high...
The UK fishing industry was cited a lot as a reason for Brexit, despite being just over 10k jobs ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an... ) and less economically significant than Warhammer.
(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)
While they say it’s about the jobs, it is so very clearly about who is making how much money by propping up coal ( and other industries)
Chinese also have battery manufacturing, whose rapidly falling cost-curve is what is missing to enable 24/7 solar.
American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.
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.
8% of electricity, not total world energy.
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.
Honestly, seems like a good trade to me.
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.
Thanks, I completely misunderstood you.
> concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts
About that "solar panels cause ecological deserts" trope:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
https://glassalmanac.com/china-confirms-that-installing-sola...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
>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…
The first set of PV panels I put on our van didn't even make their 10 year warranty @ 80%. Anecdata, sure, but still data.
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).
Interesting, most of the anecdata I've heard elsewhere (for residential solar) goes the other direction - that they degrade slower than expected.
You're sure there are no dead microinverters involved, right? I guess that'd be more than 20% on a van.
No microinverters involved.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, where are these free old panels and how do I get some?
if you are in EU: https://www.secondsol.com/en/index.htm
How big is a panel?
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
https://www.energy.gov.au/news/solar-sharer-offer-cut-electr...
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.
Get solar on your roof and then just ignore their stupid rules and monopolies and corruption.
Working great for me. Friends down the road had a 16% increase in price per kWh, already locked in another 8% increase next year.
Seems like renewable maintenance companies will make a killing.
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.
That may not be a problem for a while as we're going to have to do desalination and CCS at a scale that's quite incomprehensible at the moment.
> 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.
We have a finite demand at a certain price point before running out of productive use cases.
Renewables lower the price, enabling use cases which fossil fuels were too expensive to support.
We are in for an incredibly interesting ride as we for the first time in generations lower the price floor for energy globally.
> A lot of billionaires
But if you are already a billionaire, then you could stay calm? Transform your business or sell it now?
If I would be majority shareholder of lets say Exxon, even with upcoming solar I would be more relaxed than in any other job?
Solaryuan? How does that work? You dont need to buy sun. Just the initial infrastructure. Even if, in a post oil world, china refuses to let you buy the latest panels down the line, a country could just coast on its existing solar infra. Theres no need to use the yuan to sell of buy the energy
I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
No, it's the US dollars circulating globally because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated, giving the US control over the entire global financial system.
> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated
This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
Thankyou for pointing this out. People get very weird about how the petrodollar works, it's more about convenience than force. Like the "eurodollar" of financial clearing. In general people overlook how much America (and to a lesser extent the UK) export "stability as a service". Which becomes jeopardized if the leader is unstable.
What about iranian or russian oil? Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?
> Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?
Both Russia and Iran are heavily sanctioned by the U.S. Neither sells its oil for dollars by default, though either will accept them, of course.
Note, too, that pricing and settlement are different. If I’m Russia selling oil to India, I can “sell” at $50/barrel and accept payment in rupees or rubles. (Indian refineries were not paying Russia dollars for oil.)
Even if the US gets it's shit together it's already lost the solar and battery fight. It will have to win the next one - which it might do with AI.
What does it mean to lose? Like we can, uh, transfer the technology and build at whatever cost we can build at. Good luck to China charging us more than that cost.
Panels prices bottomed about a year ago below many manufacturer's cash cost, and have gone mostly sideways since. https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index
If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.
Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.
Manufacturers already reacted and intensified efforts to replace silver in panels with copper:
https://finance-commerce.com/2026/02/solar-panels-silver-to-...
I know. AIKO has been using copper in their BC cells, and LONGi is making the transition. Many TOPCon cell manufacturers are using silver-coated copper pastes, but full copper metallization is unlikely to happen in the next year or two.
Even if they got stuck at that price point and never went down again it's already over. 30 years of buying natural gas can't compete with that.
I got panels last year because I’m pretty confident that the majority of the cost of putting panels on my roof is the stuff besides the actual panels. So pricing won’t go down much for getting an actual installer to do it.
> the majority of the cost of putting panels on my roof is the stuff besides the actual panels
and installation / wages dont seem like they are going down anytime in the foreseable future
California power generation profile yesterday showing solar and battery proportion.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/...
Is California enough to drag the rest of the country with them, though?
Texas, technically, generates more TWh than California. I think a data center boom followed by a bust would help a lot more than what California can do. Unlike in cars, CAs market size or regulations can’t help/hinder other fuel sources as much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
Good point.
Are Texas and California enough to drag the rest of the US with them?
Interesting this doesn't get passed around as much, not only does Texas generate more than California, it's twice as much.
The % is lower, but still higher than the countries average.
Other comments mentioned Texas, but check out the Ercot dashboard: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
Not only did solar and wind provide the vast majority of power during the day today, as I write this comment coal is neck-and-neck with storage as an energy resource - i.e. power that was saved during the day because it was so sunny.
Coal simply makes no economic sense as a power source for electricity generation anymore. Natural gas is still needed as base load for when renewables are insufficient, but in perhaps the "free market ideological capital" of Texas, the trend towards renewables + storage is simply the economic choice.
Today Texas kissed 50% generation from solar around 11:30AM and was generating 63% from wind last night.
What are your thoughts on oil?
Grid-connected PV in Texas has grown between 33% and over 100% every year since 2008, which outpaces the growth of solar in the US in the same timeframe.
California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.
It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.
It doesn't need to. The reality is companies are going to go for whatever the cheapest cost for electricity is, and solar w/ batteries has taken that lead. Capitalism happens to align with a renewable energy green transition, regardless of whatever the US political engine wants. At the end of the day most companies are going to choose profit over political ideology.
Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/02/2...
You're right but the problem is subsidies change that math. If the US gov subsidizes oil, then the economics of that work out even if solar wins in a free market.
That's true, but also requires that companies believe those subsidies will remain in place over ~20-30 years. Assuming US elections remain fair, that's not going to be the case. By contrast solar / wind subsidies are effective since the bulk of their cost is up-front, so you can generally rely on getting full value out of those subsidies.
Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.
I agree. Subsidies will delay, but they will not change the outcome.
Considering we are racing against CO2 release and the warming planet, I worry that the delay makes a large difference in outcome, not for energy breakdown, but in quality of life for humanity.
What does it mean to do battery-based power generation?
It means you charge the batteries when you have extra power (like a sunny day), and you use that charge to handle the times you don't.
Hm, so that seems to kind of obscure how that power actually got generated. Maybe it was all coal, although that seems unlikely. It seems like battery usage is important to measure. But calling it generation seems to obscure something, unless they're double-counting the generation. That's misleading in another way though.
It's not coal.
Here's the chart with everything but battery+solar turned off.
https://imgur.com/a/5HfjAdI
Makes the scenario quite clear. No double counting.
Someone desperately needs to build the largest solar farm on earth, nakedly as a direct affront to China, and call it the "The Grand Trump Sun Energy Complex", with a large statue of him standing at the center of the massive radial field of panels.
The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.
You’re joking but that would probably actually work
With what panels? The vast majority are made in China.
The US manufactures more solar panels now than it ever has before. It just looks small because Chinese solar manufacturing has grown enormously.
First Solar makes panels in the US and is the single largest supplier for utility scale solar farms in the US. If someone wanted to build the world's largest solar farm in the US as a stunt, domestic First Solar capacity alone could do it:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/11/03/first-solar-to-open-i...
The current single largest solar farm is 15.6 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. It would take a bit more than a year of First Solar domestic manufacturing to surpass that.
So are MAGA hats.
The irony of proudly wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat made overseas to support a renowned grifter… I have no words.
China will replace Oil (+Fossil fuel) based ecosystems and applications of energy. Think about all the Oil wealth, but add on energy storage, an unsolved problem of mankind, and all the applications of energy production+storage. We already see this dominance in EVs. Soon, everything else will be replaced. We live in interesting times!
The worlds militaries will always require oil.
Also, the US has a lot of influence over the flow of oil in the world. A world of cheap solar energy removes that influence.
True, but until we reach a global state, everyone’s militaries require much oil.
And for a regime claiming to support jobs, sustainable energy provides/requires orders of magnitude more workers than the obsolete, expensive, and dirty coal they are pushing again for no reason.
Moreover, no semi-smart coal miner would wish a coal mining career on their sons. They'd want them to have honest work that is clean and won't likely kill them either quickly in a disaster or slowly by breathing in coal and rock dust all day.
>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution
the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.
They cut down their forests to build ships; they needed coal to keep the lights on.
Some comment I read I keep coming back to. They (elites) will risk everything to give up nothing.
The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.
It's just so breathtakingly OBVIOUS. And it has been for a decade. Yet we have done nearly nothing.
I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.
The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.
"Drill baby drill" as he said this week.
He doesn't care about solar because it does nothing to boost his narcissism. Simple as that. He can't take credit for it. It doesn't boost his image. It's just a simple quiet thing sitting there working.
The Trump administration is intentionally trying to kill solar so that their oil buddies can make money for another 5-10 years.
It’s insane to think that close to 80% of cars in shenzen are electric. I don’t even understand how that works. These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.
> These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.
As one comment says, many of those are going from 0 cars to 1 car. But also the average age of cars in China is less: https://min.news/en/auto/6ebd7edbc7df2c10102b857be9c06a47.ht...
It's also worth questioning what wealth and poverty look like in China; the changes in family structure; savings, investment, and credit; and so on. Shenzen is a rich city.
I guess most just did not have a car before...
It's quadrupled in population in the last two decades and gone from a manufacturing hub to China's Silicon Valley, so it's probably the least surprising place to be full of EVs.
You refuse to understand the difference between capacity and utilization. That mass of solar still only makes about 1/6th the actual number of watts of power delivered to the grid. Anyone who shows you capacity numbers about energy generation is intentionally lying to you. Capacity factor matters. The capacity factor of nuclear is .9. For Hydro and FF, its .6. For solar its .1. That means 9 watts of solar capacity generates the same amount of power as 1 watt of nuclear capacity or 1.5 watts of Hydro capacity. That's why you keep getting shown capacity instead of utilization (the number that matters).
Parent didn't mention either capacity or utilization? The article itself is mentioning generation. Not sure where you're getting what you're responding to?
The article reports capacity (which doesn't matter) not utilization (which does). Not sure why you are responding about a topic about which you literally don't know the first thing.
Capacity factor solar is highly variable. AFAIK in Arizona it's something like 0.3.
I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
And effectively it did: many people are kept in their place by the combined pressure points of debt and employment to stay (barely) afloat.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.
For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point
Would note that New World-style chattel slavery doesn't seem to have broadly historically precedented.
True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.
> if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves
Not at all. The fact that we have practically zero first-hand accounts from the slaves of antiquity speaks volumes to their treatment. My point is on scale (and with that, the institution's effect on the societies that hosted it).
Slavery in Europe was replaced with a more efficient system in the Middle Ages.
So calling it a constant throughout history is only true in the way that slavery still exists today, in that you could find it somewhere on the globe.
That’s partly true, but it’s also the case that medieval Europe didn’t have any convenient sources of slaves. Conquests had dried up, Europe was effectively surrounded by stronger neighbors, and instead of being able to take their neighbors as slaves many of their neighbors were taking Europeans as slaves.
That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.
Ah, the master of bad takes is at it again.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast. and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.
Because slavery was everywhere.
> Ah, the master of bad takes is at it again.
Peace and love to you too, brother.
>Except that of course it wasn't.
Except that it definitely was.
no.
Mississippi declaration of secession.
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
The full preamble of the Mississippi declaration is fascinating, and further shuts down doubters that the civil war wasn't about slavery and racism:
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.
I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.
Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.
People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.
It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.
Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce.
Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.
Yup. This is why it failed.
I think it was fairly common for plantations to loan, rent, or trade slaves just as they treated any other asset.
Technology developed after Smith's writing changed the calculus. The cotton gin made wide-scale cotton cultivation far more lucrative, and drove American slavery: https://historyincharts.com/the-impact-of-the-cotton-gin-on-...
Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US
The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)
It's true the first mills were in the north because they had some good sites, but there are good mill sites throughout the South as well. More tellingly, when the first steam engines in the US were imported from Europe - they could have been just as easily installed in the South.
I think more importantly, steam mills solved for a problem the south did not have. If one was to tell a southerner, I have a technology that will save on labor costs, the southerner's response would have been "what are labor costs?"
You still have to wonder why the south never built factories to compete with the north. They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
I'd venture that the north's earlier industrialization built up experience and supporting infrastructure which made it a dubious business prospect for any southerner that might have considered building a factory, along with the fact that making textiles by manpower alone made less money than picking cotton and exporting it.
> They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
It seems to fit the pattern of a resource curse.
Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be accurate. The missouri/mississipi rivers come to mind, as do many other river systems.
My impression was that there was a lack of fast moving rivers which were suitable for water wheels. You could make some elevation, or build a larger wheel, but that can become prohibitive for the volume needed for a real factory.
It looks like the south does have some suitable rivers, but you wonder why they exported their crops to the north just to buy them back again in their more processed form...that just doesn't make much sense from an economic standpoint. Clearly slavery wasn't a suitable replacement for the type of production work done in the north. It must have been a mix of social factors, combined with the fact that the north specialized in industry early on and you couldn't compete very well with the lack of expertise and lack of industry which supported the local industry in the south.
Anyway this is all just wild speculation. Take it for what you will.
> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.
> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.
One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.
[flagged]
- The difference between Ben Franklin writing about farming in the 1770s and the civil war was that industrialization didn't hit the US until the 1810s/1820s when the first steel mills and steam engines were set up.
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
- The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
New Orleans has entered the chat.
I liked it better when you guys called yourselves "Know Nothings". It made it easier to follow what was going on.
These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
ah yes the famine was because the people were lazy and did not want to farm. the history understander has logged on for everyone here!
[flagged]
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.
Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
The issue (for the masters, and besides any ethical issues) is being a slave master is a very tenuous position, and prone to revolts.
Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.
Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
That's the dream. Except in the minds of those who aim to bring it about you are in some unmarked plot.
Yeah roving bands of murdering robots would be a problem in that scenario. We should be able to keep/maintain our current security and rule of law though.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
> Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic.
And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy.
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
"Oxen? Paid laborers? "
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
"What we'd now call the developed world."
The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.
I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?
"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"
Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.
Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
> The Russians you mention managed it in 1723
In 1861.
The link lists this in 1723:
> Peter the Great converts all house slaves into house serfs, effectively making slavery illegal in Russia.
1861 ditches serfdom, too.
Yep. The power of rebranding.
Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.
And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.
> This is a system stretching over millennia
not quite. 'Slavery' has been around that long. 'Chattel Slavery' started in the 1600s and peaked in the 1800s. So like, half a millenia.
Chattel slavery in the Islamic world definitely predates the 1600s. By a thousand years or so.
Like trying to assess the economy of the Third Reich while omitting that whole pesky war thing
They used slave labor too, don't forget!
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
Interesting life in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
> Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0
Slaves cost money. You have to feed and house them. Plus, they require security to keep them inline.
They have to be more productive per dollar than a free individual.
> Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work.
And yet, we invent things like the cotton gin, "enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation", patented in 1794.
I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make. The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
https://freedomcenter.org/voice/eli-whitney-cotton-gin/
> The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
Clearly, you are much more clever than I am because I still have no idea what your thesis is supposed to be.
Thesis: Slavery is a morally unacceptable crutch that leads to stagnation over innovation in the long run.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold.
I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
Offshoring generally improves the lives of the people who get the offshored jobs. Usually foreign companies pay more and have better working conditions than the local companies.
Yeah, that's a lie. It's propaganda.
Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.
The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/m...
There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.
> …if you exclude the enslaved…
If you ignore the part that makes you wrong, then you are right.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.
If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.
If you own a lot of slaves your life is better than the freemen who own less/none, much less slaves. However society overall could be muca better even if for you personally it is worse
I am quite hopeful. One benchmark that was passed only very recently was Levelized Full System Cost parity in Texas. That is, the total cost of generating electricity via renewables, importantly, including storage and infrastructure costs became equivalent to other options.
I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.
It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.
> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry
Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
That’s true today, it wasn’t true when Germany was heavily subsidizing solar to get economies of scale going.
Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually had a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.
Solar is just one technology. Decarbonizing successfully requires still further huge investments in batteries, modular nuclear reactors, CO2 removal, zero-carbon steel production, aviation e-fuels, non-fossil plastics, etc. But yes, hopefully we've unlocked enough economic advantage with just that one technology to get us 90% of the way there just on the basis of economics. (If the current administration doesn't find some way to sabotage it.)
It's just a shame that they didn't end up enjoying the spoils very long. They had very good panels that were researched and produced in Germany but they got completely wiped out by cheap Chinese products
It's a cute ideal, but you can't disentangle government from the energy sector. It's too big.
How do markets build infrastructure as large as an LNG terminal without the government tipping the scales with various guarantees? How do you build a literal coastline of refineries without government clearing the way with permissive regulations? How can you say "let markets figure it out" when the US military is the acquisition department of Halliburton's Iraqi joint venture?
Pretending "markets can figure it out if we just remove government subsidies" is hopelessly naiive. Geopolitics is mostly energy policy.
> you can't disentangle government from the energy sector
Nobody argued as much. My point is the net effect of social pressure on the energy transformation has been costly—financially and politically—for relatively little bang.
Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world.
A whole class of parasites who have made their lives as highwaymen on the densest energy source (outside of uranium) -- that literally comes out of the ground -- have spent at least the last 20 years actively suppressing alternatives.
In some places (see Alberta, Canada), they have literally outlawed renewable developments.
In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative.
There is no "free market" way out of the current situation regardless of how economically viable solar is. In the real world markets and power are intrinsically linked.
It's also actually also an emergency
> Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world
Yet somehow these opponents have been ham fisted when it comes to opposing the projects which make commercial sense?
> In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative
Agree. But the bans were counterproductive.
> There is no "free market"
You're the only one in this thread who's brought up free markets.
> It's also actually also an emergency
In a sense. I'd underscore, again, that the breathless activism did approximately nothing–the actual gains came from China pursuing national-security interests and market forces driving the deployment and development of solar, wind and batteries.
> the breathless activism did approximately nothing
The subsidies for solar in places like Germany in the 2000's were crucial for the insane solar cost curve we have today. Those subsidies primarily came from "breathless activism" IMO.
Wait, which part is China and which is Europe? Solar didn't win in China because of social pressure, but also not because of market forces. It did win because the CCP made energy independence a political goal.
If we let the markets have their way, Earth becomes unhabitable. Coal and oil plants aren't being shut down. In fact, we have more than ever with additional ones on the way.
It's because "free market" is and always has been a misnomer. Free to ignore externalities, yes. But our shared ecosystem is not seen as a market participant, so it can't charge the true cost of burning hydrocarbons.
We'd also still have industry dumping raw waste directly into our waterways. I'm not so sure that this wouldn't have killed more people faster than unregulated coal/oil plants.
Markets are constructed. It's possible to engineer toward the outcome you want by designing the market in a way that brings it about. Unfortunately, this is considered a socialist (which, in the US, is largely synonymous with "demonic") idea unless you want to change a market in ways that benefit entrenched elites.
Making it illegal (or expensive, via outsized taxes) to burn fossil fuels would ultimately just be another change in the rules of the market -- players will optimize within that space and find the best way to deliver energy and other services within those constraints (assuming enforcement is such that they can't just skirt the laws -- enforcement is also part of the market design).
One can frame this as "incorporating externalities" in order to help marketist ideologues swallow it, but the audience for that is almost entirely composed of people with second homes on islands with tax-cheating-based economies. Normal people are fine with the explanation of "this would have horrible and unpredictable consequences for the world your children are inheriting, so we're making it illegal".
We are at the tail end of 30+ years of successful social awareness efforts, and government regulation and incentivization.
Social awareness and pressure produced the government action necessary to incubate the early markets and seed research. It helped to spur the armies of young researches set about improving solar generation, wind generation, power storage, electric motors, and even LEDs.
Yeah, it's "obvious" now the economics make sense for producers to build wind and solar farms. Or yeah, purchasing LEDs is a no-brainer now why on earth would anyone want to incandescent bulbs; that's boomer tech.
I operate incandescent bulbs because I consider them healthier than LED bulbs, especially the incandescents with neodymium glass that transmits UV light.
(Unlike my LED bulbs though, I will turn an incandescent off every time I step away from it.)
I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.
Greeks had toys that couldn't produce meaningful amounts of power. And they had no real ways to improve that.
This perfectly demonstrates the point: Before James Watt came along, neither had the English. Steam was unreliable, broke down a lot, killed people, and was only tolerated because it was the only game in town. This bothered society, so money became available so smart people could sit down and give it a solid theoretical basis.
The greek had plenty of smart people, but nobody bothered to assign them the unreliable steam problem. There are secondary problems like metallurgy, but smart people can work on them or find away around them, too.
That's... not what happened.
England started experimenting with steam because it _could_. Newcomen's atmospheric engine required metalworking that was flat-out impossible before the advent of modern(ish) iron-making processes.
Greeks would have needed to perfect large-scale iron-making. And in England's case, it was itself driven by the need to manufacture things like cannons, anchors, chains, etc.
If you somehow got transported into Greece with a perfect knowledge of steam engines, you first would need to spend several lifetimes researching the iron metallurgy. You would be able to build a toy steam engine out of bronze, maybe, but good quality bulk bronze was expensive enough to be used as currency.
Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.
Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.
What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.
The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".
This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.
Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?
In the US the invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated slavery, which prior to that point had been declining. In the Antebellum south, slavery was profitable, with average return on slaves of about 8 to 10%. Even after slavery was legally abolished, extremely similar social institutions remained for decades (share cropping + institutionalized racism). It wasn't until the 1940s that cotton picking was mechanized.
The North steamrolled the South economically because manufacturing steamrolls agriculture in terms of productivity, but an apples to apples comparison between farmers shows slave owning plantations were economically more productive than free farmers. After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.
Obviously slaves were individually much worse off than if they were free, and society as a whole suffered from the suppression of human capital. Had all those people been free for all that time, imagine what could have been accomplished besides growing more cotton. But for the slave-owner, there was never a point where abolition became economically advantageous, hence why slavery was ended at gunpoint.
> After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.
I wonder how much of that was because of economies of scale (Even if it's forced scale). Plantations are large and have many workers, and can scale without having to worry (to a degree) about retaining workers, since workers are for most intents just machines you invest in and pay to keep up in that system, which allows for easier scaling.
We've seen increasing consolidation of farms into large entities over the centuries, so perhaps this was just a system that made that much, much easier to do.
What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.
With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.
I hope you are right. My fear is that it could allow unrestricted limits to tear down the rest of nature.
Alternatively, it could mean that we would no longer need to do that as a lot of materials that are restricted by energy costs become viable. If energy is almost free you can extract a lot of trace materials from almost anywhere.
My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.
Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.
Which is identical to all the balance sheets today will oil and gas infrastructure and the billions dumped into ICE R&D they were hoping to amortize over the next 30 years.
They’ll fight tooth and nail
Identical might be a bit strong. It's only identical if we signed a law that made oil and gas illegal tomorrow. There are definitely parallels, but this is much more of a normal market situation where most things are handled through incentives, not regulation to such an extreme degree we make the common immediately illegal.
Perhaps most importantly, it not being an immediate change allows the entrenched interests time to shift their strategies and portfolios over time to take advantage of the more economically advantageous option. Many people aren't happy with the time frames that generally requires, but they also seem to be very happy with reliable energy and and economy that doesn't collapse overnight and having invested a year or two ago in a car which would become worthless tomorrow.
I thought it was getting increasingly disadvantageous and on the way out, then cotton mill suddenly make it advantageous again, recementing slavery.
> belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous
On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.
Not only that, but slavery in the south didn't "end" anywhere near as fast as people think it did. Even when plantations stopped using chains and shooting people for leaving the plantation, they just switched to slightly more subtle ways. Sharecropping, barring them from owning property, running lynch mobs to kill anyone who stepped afoul of the unspoken rules, and not allowing black people into most public spaces.
To this day southern conservatives talk about "state's rights" as being the reason for the civil war. Yeaaaaaah no
Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.
Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.
So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.
If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
Salved are free in neither up front nor ongoing cost, just as industrial equipment is not. It comes down to costs. Industrial equipment that is most costly than slaves seems unlikely to supplant them based on monetary incentives alone, while once it is less costly it's just the social economic momentum which needs to be overcome, which is likely a matter of time.
Importantly, I think there's only so much advancement you can get out of people by investing in economies of scale and iterating on process (and people, as icky as that idea is), while there's a huge amount of advancement to get out of machinery, including moving to whole new categories of machinery (which depending on how far you want to take the "slaved are machines" metaphor is waht a shift away from slaves was in the first place). In that respect maybe what you're noting is just that the shift from slaves to machines was the first in an iterative process which is speeding up over time.
> If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
I think maybe the right was to look at it is if we were able to abolish slavery and keep the same output (which might have required an economic or social system that incentivized farm consolidation for economies of scale that plantations were able to more easily achieve), then yes, we would have terraformed mars by now, but probably just because we happened to be along the tech tree earlier in the timeline.
I have consistently held that solar will replace oil once solar becomes cheap. Literally you cannot beat the market. This is not revisionist. It's simply true. The same thing holds America back from barbarism. Our material wealth is what allows our society. That's why it's important to maintain both
It depends how you look at it
> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna
China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.
So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.
Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime
(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)
Even if global greenhouse gas emissions immediately and permanently stop, climate change won’t. We have many years of further warming ahead of us due to the greenhouse gases already dumped into the atmosphere.
Then we move on to carbon capture at scale.
And who is going to pay for that? Pretty sure it's going to be neither Russia, China, Saudi Arabia nor the USA.
And have Dubai make a few new islands out of diamonds?
With enough energy you can do literally anything.
And to that point as well we have tech working on using more energy but less carbon like Boston Metal is doing with carbon less steel.
The current political landscape has me black pilled but on the technology side we have a lot to look forward to.
https://www.bostonmetal.com/
Not diamonds, but olivine. And Dubai isn’t the only one who’d have an interest, anywhere with coastal property that likes to maintain it against erosion is a target for this, admittedly experimental, technique.
https://www.vesta.earth/
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?
Which countries do you think of when discussing industrialised countries that use slave labour?
Optimizing on an individual vs societal level.
I read a piece that calculated the economic value of the slaves just before the civil war and compared it with investments in fossil fuels.
It made a convincing case that people would rather start catastrophic wars than just transition to a better economic system, if a few rich people had a lot to lose.
Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.
It's not quite as straightforward as that though. You're also required to pay a large sum up front to get the worker, have to pay for room and board and health for the worker, including children of workers which while they are investments that may eventually pay off, are mostly cost sinks until at least a few years have passed. There's more of a trade-off that might be immediately obvious when you dig into the reality of what it took.
Slaves aren’t free.
You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them.
You need to do basic medical care.
And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk.
Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision.
Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.
> For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death
you really can't imagine a better situation than humans owning humans?
Obviously horrible from an ethical and moral perspective. But for a morally decrepit factory owner, free/extremely cheap labor is the dream.
> still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically...
not crazy especially as slavery was supplanted by debt, which is in a way fractional slavery (minus the chattel part ofc)
It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.
There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting.
Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.
This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.
There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.
There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?
We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
> We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.
Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.
Do we actually know that goodness/evilness is 0% inheritable?
0%? Extremely unlikely. [0] Is your plan as an evil overlord to implement the stack ranking killing the evilest 10% generation after generation for the good of humanity?:)
Also hope you’re going global since other populations will quickly outcompete the docile sub-population if given chance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_aggression
> the dark side of slavery
oh mate
So solar energy falls from the sky, but what about the resources it takes to make the panels?
Insignificant and recyclable forever
Slavery was ended in the USA by the Civil War veterans.
Which is funny because we've had an environmentally and economically optimal source of power since the 50s (nuclear) which we deliberately phased out due to panic cycles.
[dead]
Is this a joke comment or do you not realize that people were treated like chattel slaves while working in the first factories?
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement.
I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.
Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).
At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).
"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".
HN is truly lost.
> I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change.
I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.
Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.
Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]
So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).
We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].
It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.
0. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of...
Kind of a weird headline. It makes it sound like this just happened. But it happened almost 2 years ago. Reading the article is also a bit confusing. I finally figured out they are only referring to utility scale solar and not total solar (utility plus behind the meter)
My overlay of the data: https://eia.languagelatte.com/
Raw data: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0
Presumably we have dammed everything that made sense to (and some that didn't), so solar / wind will keep growing while hydro is unlikely to change (unless it drops).
if this type of data is interesting to you, here’s a site I’ve built that tracks like grid data across the US and Canada: https://www.gridstatus.io/live
We have generation mix, load, and pricing data. Both real time and historical
Never seen this before and looks great.
How often does this get updated?
We stream new data in as the sources publish it. typically, every 5 minutes.
We collect from a lot of sources, so nearly every minute something is updating.
I'm not disputing anything, but would it have killed arstechnica to include some primary source links to back up their assertions?
A direct link would be better, but they mentioned it at the beginning: "On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025."
This is the report: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/current_month/februa...
It has full-year data for 2025 in table ES1.B.
Does anyone in these comments have any tips for would-be solar farmers or people who are generally interested in being part of building out the future of our grid? I'd like to get my hands dirty. I'm talking about getting into 5-10 MW projects, not solar on a roof.
Trying to cost this out (in a UK context), I found very few press releases give actual cost numbers. This was rather cute though: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sittingbourne/news/you-can-hear... "took over a 5MW site in Bobbing, near Sittingbourne, in December 2023 after raising £176,100 of investments through a crowdfunding campaign"
That is for taking it over from a previous operator, and seems extremely low. More recognizable £1.5k/kW numbers give about £7.5m for that. So unless you're independently wealthy then finance is going to be your #1 consideration. It might actually be easier to do community funding in the UK than the US, provided you structure your investors as creditors and not equity.
#2 consideration is going to be planning rules and the availability of special get-outs for renewables schemes.
#3 is going to be grid connection. In the UK you need permission from OFGEM for large systems. It is also potentially expensive if they make you pay to dig up the road and lay 5MW cabling.
Acquiring land is tied in to all of those.
Don't start with a 5MW project. Start with a 10-20kW ground-mount project in your back yard. Then build a 100-200kW project before trying MW.
I think the hardest part of building a solar farm is the permitting. Many municipalities are hostile to the idea of converting farmland into solar fields, even with agrovoltaics. There are special interest groups that may come in and try to derail your project by propagandizing the local community against it. "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
If I were doing this I'd be looking for a partner that is already in the business. The politics are a lot more complicated than the technology. It would be very easy to get screwed over if you don't know which palms to grease.
In many states, state law overrides local planning's ability to prevent siting renewables. Check if your state is one of these states if your project size requires it.
> "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
Indeed. The US farms almost 60 million acres for biofuels, the size of the state of Oregon. These arguments do not come from serious people imho. People are simply married to their rural identity and ag cosplay, despite it being wildly inefficient and subsidized by the federal government.
https://kaufman.substack.com/p/at-least-31-states-consider-o...
https://cleantomorrow.org/reports/
(have installed 100kw+ in residential solar, and have experience following along for a ~100MW project)
That's probably why it's best to stay small. If you've gotten permits for 10kw project in a backyard or on a Walmart roof, you'll probably have a leg up when you start playing at a scale that brings out the nimbys.
This depends; my UK 3.9kWh installation was permit-exempt, requiring only an MCS certified installer so I could be eligible for feed-in tariffs. The permit regime changes as the schemes get larger.
Is there a big overlap in experience building a 5MW project and a 10-20kw project? The former would involve, I imagine, more of a project manager, fund-raiser, and general contractor role for GP. The latter can be a DIY effort if they are handy and licensed. There's no way anyone is single-handedly installing the panels and inverters for a 5MW project in a reasonable timeframe.
Even the hardware, land acquisition, and permitting stories would be different, right?
No idea why that question was considered downvote-worthy.
Why? Like, I can think of obvious reasons, but what are you trying to say someone will learn from this stepping?
I bookmarked this thread because i'm very interested too. If AI takes all teh corporate jobs then I'm going to be a photon farmer. you can get land down in Brewster County Texas for about $1,500/acre but would need to find a spot close to a grid access point. There's some decent reddit discussions on this sort of thing.
I wish it would bring prices down to a point where it would make sense to install on every home. Particularly, in California, costs have increased and the value proposition decreased drastically with NEM3.0. So, the solar industry here has kind of imploded even though it desperately needs to be built out to power my home’s OpenClaws.
The article doesn't mention this, but I assume part of this is because the US is actively dismantling hydro power by removing dams. It turns out what while hydro power is "green" in terms of not polluting, it's still quite harmful to the environment because of animals like salmon that need to be able to traverse rivers and the rest of the ecosystem that depends on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_the_Un...
I wonder why existing hydro isn't utilized to it's potential. For instance, the Grand Coulee Dam has the highest capacity of any power station in the US of almost 7 MW but usually puts out about a third of that.
Niagra falls doesn't run at full capacity because it takes away from the attraction of the falls themselves, and tourism is important there. They turn up capacity after hours, and the falls slow down.
Not only that, they use the gravitational potential of the falls to store massive amounts of energy when there's a surplus. Way cheaper to hold or even pump the water back up to the reservoir at the top than build lithium batteries. So yeah, as a local, can confirm they turn Niagara Falls (partially) off at night. Thanks to the Falls and several nuclear plants on Lake Ontario, Upstate NY and Southern Ontario have some of the lowest carbon electricity in the countries. Quebec is even better with basically all of their power coming from hydro.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam
The Ginna nuclear plant is the second oldest in the US and is on a license extension that expires in three years. There is nothing to replace that capacity. Western NY is going to see significant price hikes because of this short-sightedness.
Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam is currently at 23.6% of capacity. Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is currently at 29.7% of capacity.
Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.
It turns out that "releasing immense amounts of water downstream" can have side effects.
What do you think is happening to the water not being utilized in the production of power? I assumed it's still being run downstream, just not through the power producing turbines.
I'd expect there's not a big effect on the ultimate amount of water being released downstream either way.
They let the reservoir fill up for when the power and/or drinking water is needed later.
The max is like a car engine’s redline. That the car can hit it doesn’t mean you should at all times.
Looking at the data for lake that goes through the dam, it seems like they keep it at the same level. So it probably CAN make 7MW with more flow, but generally only flows at a state that puts out 2.
There is no way it’s max is 7MW. They likely meant 7GW.
7MW is the amount of power you can get from a couple of diesel gensets, waaaay smaller than even a small power plant
[https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/power-systems/electri...]
Yes, 7GW. I can't edit original comment.
I looked into this more, and there is quite a bit of seasonal variability to contend with as well.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... has some interesting data on the Columbia River and its dams.
From that https://youtu.be/jvnaiHFT6nQ is a visualization of the water releases for the river to allow the water to get to the right dam for the anticipated power use.
Limited water resource. In recent drought years, gas-fired power plants in California had to make up for reduced hydro generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
They are used as dispatchable sources. Capture value by being able to provide enormous amounts of power when needed compared to the watershed flow.
Vogtle is probably producing the most electricity out of any generating plant in the US once you consider capacity factor.
Vogtle is also the most expensive electricity in the world, the only electricity costing more than $10,000 per kW.
And on the other end of the spectrum, grand coulee would be ~$1,500/kW in todays dollars.
Those are very different metrics.
edit: Parent got edited; it was talking about $0.02/kwh initially.
Vogtle won't stay the most expensive. My idiotic government (Ontario, Canada) is committing to building a new nuclear plant. $400 billion for 10GW, and that's before the inevitable delays and cost overruns. Maybe we'll break the $100,000 per kW mark!
Related: Alec Watson’s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy.
“You are being misled about renewable energy technology”
https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=CJ_Tt9DnWSKH8eGC
One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway.
Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
> One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?)
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
At scale no group is against its own personal interests. It sucks and it’s hypocritical and annoying, but that’s humans.
> At scale no group is against its own personal interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
Don’t you think they thought this was self-interest?
I’m sure they did!
But it clearly wasn’t.
> At scale no group is against its own personal interests.
Of course they are. That's the whole point of scapegoating: convincing people that their problems are caused by another group while actually working against their interests.
Why is it inherently good for a group to be against its own personal interests? Whose interests should a group favor instead?
Programmers are, because we keep encouraging AI to replace us.
Yeah, I think the fact they are willing to dance to any new tune under Trump gives away the game completely. Whether it will make any difference to the audience is something I've stopped hoping about.
> It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality.
one of the few good things Rick Perry did for TX was upgrade the grid so West Texas wind power can reach the main cities. Once West TX showed renewables could make a profit then there's not much anyone, left or right, could do to stop it. The lobbyists made sure of that.
Southwest Texas, where all the fracking took place, also turns out to be good for solar. It's very flat, sunny, and has pretty stable weather. I guess the grid is beefed up and accessible in that region because of the oil/gas industry, I've seen solar farms out there that are so big it's hard to describe. Imagine seeing a shimmering blue that looks like a lake on the desert horizon but then you get to it and it's just miles of solar panels. Again, the moment solar turned a profit there was no stopping it.
I suspect it's a left vs right issue because the right is the cheerleader of the military industrial complex, which is only justified by protecting oil interests. If oil becomes a curiosity useful for making certain consumer products and little else, the military industrial complex is oversized by any metric, hence the right is against that.
Or to oversimplify even more: it's the Bush dynasty's fault.
Yea I wonder how that battery capacity graph will look like post January 2026, since Texas's SB388 specifically excludes batteries from it's dispatchable power generation requirements. That doesn't necessarily prevent batteries storage from being constructed, but it does tilt the field pretty heavily in favor of natural gas.
AFAIU that bill did not pass and died.
Sadly they can be stopped. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% only a year ago!
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/02/2...
It became left vs right because the interests of the rich have an easier time exploiting the right wing's vulnerability to fusion identity. The right wing is defined by a collective appreciation for hierarchies and conformity.
A lot of folks are spreading the message 'it's not right vs left but up vs down when in reality its both.
> I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?)
Besides the whole petro money and lobbyism thing that drove the US politics since Edwin Drake?
I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
You also get 30 years of efficiency improvements and 20 years of capacity and reliability improvements when you replace them.
In practice: https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2026/0116/1553440-mayo-wind...
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
It's funny, there was meme-like behavior a few years ago where anti-wind advocates would say "they're tearing down the wind farms before their end of life, like only 15 years in! Clearly wind doesn't work at all!"
And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.
Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
Well, in that case they’re also far bigger turbines (bigger than were available when the original project was built, granted).
Biggest take away - 90 million acres in the US go to corn/ethanol production. 31 acres of corn for ethanol to match the energy production of just 1 acre of solar panels. Revenue could be 3-4x that of corn production. Get ready for rise of the photon farmers.
May the man run for office
The world isn't ready for that.
Maybe it is.
That entire talk didn't once mention the phrase "energy density" which is the real reason we rely so heavily on hydrocarbons.
Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.
And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].
It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.
0. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324
> It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil…
That's what happens when the "Leader of the Free World" is 79 with dementia with memories of the 1970s oil crisis.
We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
Military vehicles that take oil-derived fuel take diesel, not hydrocarbons. The oil in Venezuela serves that purpose nicely.
No, I am not condoning anything here, just pointing something out.
There’s plenty of diesel available to us that doesn’t require stabilizing an authoritarian Central American nation and rebuilding their oil industry first.
> We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone.
Edit for ratelimiting:
> You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
No. I was simply saying the oil is useful in the military-industrial complex, and it does have value. I've said this twice already. I cannot say if this value will be realized, and for the third time, I don't condone it.
> I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/05/venezuelan-...
> The gamble is a long game, with no guarantee of success. Returning Venezuela’s crude production to 3m barrels of oil a day would require 16 years of work and investment totalling $185bn (£137bn), according to figures from Rystad Energy, a global consultancy.
> At least $30-35bn of international capital would need to be committed in the next two to three years to make this scenario plausible, Rystad said. “This could only be financed by international oil companies, which will consider investments in Venezuela only if they have full confidence in the stability of the country’s systems and its investment climate for international oil and gas players,” it added.
I think Venezuela and Iran are more about restricting the oil to China in case of a conflict rather than providing energy for the US, although getting ahead of an anticipated demand increase from AI data centers is probably a contributing motivation.
I don't think interdicting Venezuelan oil in a US/China conflict would be too much of a challenge for the US, given... geography. It certainly doesn't require us to control the country or its oil industry.
> That entire talk didn't once mention the phrase "energy density" which is the real reason we rely so heavily on hydrocarbons.
For planes. For no other major use of hydrocarbons is it the primary concern.
Transatlantic shipping also. Planes require highly refined fuel though, while ships can burn most anything flammable, even really crappy biofuels. Hardly anything is worse than heavy fuel oil.
Different types of density. Transatlantic shipping cares primarily about volumetric density, air travel cares primarily about gravimetric density.
So we can both be correct since OP was not specific. :)
He has a whole video[0] on the difference between energy and electricity, so he understands it. Maybe there's some disconnect between the video and your interpretation.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc
Arguably that's honestly worse since he knew and was disingenuous in order to push a perspective that isn't valid.
He talks about transport and heating
That doesn't leave much left when you look at the energy flow once you remove domestic, commercial and transportation usage and replace it with electricity. A tiny amount left for plane s(and reducing per flight as planes get more efficent and battery planes start coming to market), and industrial gas usage.
https://www.energyvanguard.com/attachment/llnl-us-energy-flo...
Yeah I watched this a week or so ago and had a similar issue.
I'm super optimistic about green energy and in favor of expanding it.
But also acutely aware it's barely putting a dent on energy use despite year-on-year record levels of capacity install (>90% of new capacity is green), which far exceeds expert expectations every single year. Non-renewables keep growing, forecasts and ambitions were cut by the Trump admin, and it is expected that the latest economic revolution's (AI) main bottleneck is going to be energy by the end of the year.
We have essentially blown past the paris accord thresholds (we've seen months of +1.5c temperature, which was the limit we envisioned in 2015) and despite renewables far exceeding expectations, they completely fell short of what is necessary pre-2023. Post-2023 you have Trump derailing renewables wherever he can and AI increasing demand even further.
It really looks pretty hopeless and frankly it's sad that there is no real conversation about this, which seems to be an existential question for the generation living in 2100 and beyond.
You're also now getting to the point that adding new capacity is increasing the amount of renewable energy that is being curtailed (i.e. thrown away), meaning while renewables get cheaper over time, the rate of things getting cheaper will slow down as renewables must be increasingly paired with storage investments (which are also getting cheaper but introduce additional cost).
For example, sunny Cyprus curtailed 13%, 29% and 49% (!!) of its solar generation in 2023 to 2025 respectively. Yes last year half of the solar power that was produced, was thrown away, because of a lack of demand-supply balancing. Cyprus is uniquely poorly positioned (high solar potential, small country with a single small timezone, no interconnectors to offload surplus to other countries, no storage facilities etc) but it's still a sign of things to come. Further generation will increasingly need to be paired with significant storage, or it's partially wasted.
> While the Trump administration has been hostile to renewable energy, there’s only so much it can do to fight the economics. A recent analysis of planned projects indicates that the US will see another 43 GW of solar capacity added in 2026—far more than the 27 GW added in 2025. That will be joined by 12 GW of wind power, with over 10 percent of that coming from two of the offshore wind projects that the administration has repeatedly failed to block. The largest wind farm yet built in the US, a 3.6 GW monster in New Mexico, is also expected to begin operations in 2026.
Hopecore. Onward. The horrors persist, but so do we.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
https://web.archive.org/web/20260225073026/https://www.eia.g...
Those offshore wind farms are getting completed mostly because they were so deep into development when Trump tried to cancel them, with a ton of sunk costs. So the companies were able to make the decision to go forward because the extra costs of delays and lawsuits were still cheaper than abandoning the build entirely.
Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.
Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.
I hear you, I'm just saying we keep grinding forward. This admin has less than 3 years to go. Nothing stops this freight train, even if they try to slow it down. You can't fix stupid, you can just keep turning the gears to grind it down.
> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.
As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:
https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
> Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. Vote better next time.
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Germany only became a democracy under duress in 1919, and it never really settled into a stable democracy.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, and a representative legislature 50 years before 1919. The Kaiser in many ways was more limited in power than the President of the United States.
Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.
How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff.
FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
Not to be cynical, but what does it look like when most candidates aren't acceptable to a majority of people?
there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not, there are just utilities and _relative_ satisfaction. you want to get the most satisfaction possible from the options you have.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
approval voting is insanely good at this.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
What does what look like? Approval voting? The unacceptable (usually extreme) candidates fail to get votes and so get booted out of office, with their places taken by more moderate, common-sense candidates.
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design.
If you ask most voters they'll say big money in politics is bad but if they know that why aren't they voting the issue?
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own.
This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb.
Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.
I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.
What is considered the best* system of government? Which country comes closest to the ideal model?
*best is funny to define
I guess the answer has to depend on demographics. But if we are spitballing, it probably wouldn't be all bad for every country to have a Lee Kuan Yew.
Can you provide examples that support your assertion, that the US system was already generally seen as obsolete in 1926?
Smells like BS.
"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained.
But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.
Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.
The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.
That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.
Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.
Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.
Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.
Sure, it's morphed from the original in various ways .. but perhaps not substantially enough to protect it from being gamed.
Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.
The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.
Your comments make me hopeful. Thank you.
Those ember energy reports are excellent!
The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.
I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.
You make great points, and I can only recommend reducing your exposure to the US and its choices to the best of your ability. I invest to get exposure to companies outside of the US now, not inside. I invest in renewable energy funds in Europe (partly to get citizenship, but also to contribute towards the energy transition there). I intend to leave tech soon to move into clean tech finance. The direction and trajectories are clear, to ignore them would simply be out of emotion.
Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.
Having grown up in the US, and been very proud of it despite some egregious mistakes that happened when I was of voting age that I could not stop (e.g. Iraq War), it's very hard to bet against the US. And in the past it's always been a bad idea. But you make a very compelling argument, and the returns on the US vs. international stock markets over the past year make a very objective argument that I'm investing in the wrong places.
I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
We win or we learn. I thought I was a proud American too, that these were my people. Turns out, the US is just an exploitation engine with a God/control complex attempting to bully its way to remain in its position as a superpower while neglecting everything a superpower needs to be one, for profits of those who stand to gain. It is not great because it is great, it is marketing and PR of a paper tiger that has been coasting on trust for decades while rotting from the inside. These are not my people. I no longer am invested in its outcome, but I understand others my have differing opinions. I still care about good people, and have constrained my attention scope to only those people, versus entire nation states. I focus my attention to context where problems want to be solved, not just say they are desired to be solved as a diversion strategy ("purpose of the system is what it does"). Appreciate the conversation as always. Life is short, time is non renewable, spend it wisely.
It's incredible to me that California's primary generation source is cyclical solar — which it primarily offloads to PNW [0], who offsets any missing California solar with its MASSIVE Columbia River Hydro.
Essentially co-dependant renewables, the entirety of West Coast through Colorado balancing primarily between solar and hydro (and natgas peakers). Nothing like Québec (¡hydro!), but still something.
[0] <https://i.imgur.com/QMclWZu.png> grey "other" line == sold to neighboring grids
----
If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits" [i.e. not having to follow federal regulations], they could be sloshing their primarily wind-derived kWHs into an even more-beautiful grid of flowing renewables.
Instead, 10-year winter storms risk hundreds dead and billion$ lo$t.
----
TVA is in planning stages for its second massive pump-storage facility — but Texas is probably wiser in its nascent battery storage investment [1], instead. TVA's Racoon Mountain Pumphouse is definitely impressive, but with all the upcoming "depleted" car batteries being reconditioned into the stationary electric storage market... water power storage is probably the more environmentally-damaging method (definitely more expensive?).
[1] <https://imgur.com/a/Nm0TFs1>
----
Screenshots via <https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...>
[nerd warning: my favorite real-time dataset]
US Lower-48 Primary Energy Sourcing: <https://i.imgur.com/BWXugy2.png>
----
My layperson recommendations to industry [I'm blue-collar, electrician]: reduce coal, increase nuclear; increase micro battery storage (e.g. see Chattanooga's EPB implementations); maintain but stop building dams/pumped storage.
Solar/wind/nuclear/nat.gas will be able to run everything once we have enough battery storage to handle daily peaks. In a few more years we will be entirely able to remove our dependance from toxic coal [2]
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms
> If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits"
Currently, even though it pains me to say this, ERCOT has one of the most mature battery systems in the world.
Everything else is valid though.
Absolutely: ERCOT's battery storage is worldbest.
As a fifth-generation former Texan, I understand "separatist mentality." ERCOT's buy/sell market is perhaps also the most purely capitalistic marketplace in existance (and among least-regulated, in first-world); for these reasons, winter-proofing funding is terrible and outages likely when the system is stressed (e.g. approximately every decade Texas loses power during winter storms) — which is also when generating profits are maximized (orders of magnitude increases).
Certain deregulated-market Texans are still paying off powerbills from years-old storms, a few cold days of billing often exceeding the rest of the year's usage.
they also pay like 1/5th of pg&e rates
plus it seems ERCOT has learned and the grid seems fine now
>the grid seems fine now
Time tells all.
One benefit of the previous Texas winter disaster is that the highest MWH fee was reduced from $9000/per to $3k/p [normal would be ~$30/p].
In my personal opinion the winterization of LNG lines is still not enough for the next major storm (the cause of previous two decade storms was lack of adequate heat-tracing along pipelines — not windmills [Hotwheels' deception]). This has been discussed in every post-disaster report, since the 1980s. Private grid operators see little incentive to prepare for these storms, particularly since they make so much money when the grid is stressed (just how it's set up).
Instead of the stupidity of isolation, Texas could easily amalgamate its resources with the entire rest of Lower 48 USA, and not have to spend nearly as much prepping for emergency gas lines (instead: buy power from somewhere else).
Every time someone posts a imgur link on HN I get this as response:
That's what it says when it doesn't like the look of your IP. I get it when I'm on my VPN.
Imgur really doesn't like ad-blockers. This'll get you on their "overloaded" banlist after just a few visits.
This feels like the no-brainer industry to invest in right now.
The datacenters are thirsty for energy, and the sun is free. In this gold rush, renewables are selling shovels.
I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?
Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?
How big of an install are you looking to do? I just did a ground mount install on my property. (4kw panels, 5kwh battery) If you are good with your hands, and can follow instructions then I would recommend you do the work your self. The actual installation of the panels and battery are close to plug n play. The cost of an electrician can easily double the project costs for small projects.
For the panels I did whatever was cheapest on signature solar. For batteries and inverter I did eco-worthy. (eBay for that, they run sales pretty often) in total is was $1000 for the panels (that included delivery) and around $1200 for the battery and inverter. If you have a truck then you might be able to find cheaper panels locally.
On YouTube check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He is a certified electrician and publishes part lists and plans that are easy to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse
I'm the other side of the pond, but
tesla isn't great value any more. For a while powerwalls were the shit And the powerwall three is nice, with direct DC charging as well as islanding.
But, only 13kwh still, and internet dependency, and very expensive.
I currently have enphase micro inverters and a power wall 2. It was the right mix at the time.
But, if you have the space, which I think you do, An insulated shed for a 19" rack, and choose any one of the many battery unit makers. Its about $200 per kwh now (in UK prices, I'm not sure what tarrifs are doing for you)
then get a frame for your solar (or build a barn and roof it with solar, its cheaper than 12mm plywood at the moment.)
Have micro inverters, they are more expensive, but solid state, less likely to catch fire, do MPPT better, and are not a single point of failure.
You'll need backup for when solar doesn't cover your daily needs, so either grid or some other power source.
>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries,
>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?
Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over many years to not incur non-starter level costs.
You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.
A few things that I've needed to deal with in my off grid setup:
I like the MidNite solar controllers.
LiFePO4 batteries are great, with a few caveats:
Not being able to charge below freezing shouldn't be a problem if you keep the batteries indoors. Is there a reason why you wouldn't? Fire concerns? Or is it just a space issue?
Yes, sorry, I was in a rush and didn't explain enough. For our usage, the cabin isn't occupied during the winter, and can drop below 0*C occasionally. The solar system is turned off though, so we don't worry about it.
If you're permanently there, it shouldn't be a concern. Sounds like modern BMS can disable charging at low temperatures so maybe not a worry for you at all if you're buying new batteries.
I've found lots of communities online on both reddit and facebook for solar DIY and there's some youtubers out there that talk about what you need for this and do reviews of different batteries/inverters/panels.
From what I've heard Tesla has a high cost/energy storage rate and you'd be better of going with something else (even if you have a tesla) but it would boil down to are you wanting to set this up yourself or hire a professional to do all the wiring.
All you need is a solar charge controller and a battery, and optionally an inverter.
You dont need a company to do this for you, unless you want pay $$ to connect wires.
If you are planning to get a Tesla car with PowerShare (it's slowly expanding to the Model Y and other vehicles) then you only really need one Powerwall 3, because the car when charged acts as ~7+ powerwalls worth of backup.
I was curious to try a project: can I charge my car 100 miles per day for under $1000 all in?
I’m trying to source a battery power pack and cheap panels.
That would be around 30kwh per day so probably not, but you could get close.
Assuming you're in the US, new solar modules go for about $0.28/watt.
If you dump the entire $1k into just modules, that will get you about 3.5kW of panels. Which will probably hit your target on sunny days during the summer.
But that doesn't include inverters if you want to do a grid tie, or batteries if you don't, or wiring, or whatever you're going to mount the panels on.
$1,000 is definitely too ambitious for that much energy. Even just the charging plug for the car is going to take a sizeable bite out of that.
Another way to think about this is that $1,000 is about 20 tanks of gas, assuming you get 400 miles per tank that's 8,000 miles, which is less than a year of driving for the average American. You can increase your budget and still come out way ahead.
The other consideration is that this scheme only works if you only drive at night, otherwise you'll need a battery to store that power while your car is out and about during the day, or you'll need to grid tie and use the grid as your battery.
Best bet is probably a 240v inverter, ground mounted used panels (can often be found ridiculously cheap)and a Docan or similar battery pack. 240v inverters made for the US tend to be pricier but you may be able to get an EU model to work. 120v won't be able to recharge 100mi/day. If you're in the US $1000 is prob not enough though
Since the 1990s the US has removed over 1,000 dams. If those dams were still producing power, then how would that affect their claim?
Hydroelectric generation varies a lot annually due to naturally varying precipitation. In the 1990s, hydroelectric generation reached a maximum in 1997 with 356 TWh (this was also the all-time peak) and a minimum in 1992 with 253 TWh:
https://www.eia.gov/kids/energy-sources/hydropower/
(This page is "for kids" but it includes a good plot of hydroelectric output since 1950.)
This is just from natural variability, since the US didn't build any new hydro generating facilities in the 1990s.
Here's the EIA report that has generating statistics for 2025. It has "monthly" in the name but you can find full-year stats for 2025 in table ES1.B:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/current_month/februa...
In 2025, hydroelectric power generation was 247 terawatt hours. Utility scale solar generation was 295 terawatt hours. Estimated small scale (e.g. rooftop) solar generation was 93 terawatt hours. Combined, that would bring solar generation to 383 terawatt hours for the year.
Solar generation is now higher than hydroelectric generation ever was in the US, but it's also true that hydroelectric generation is lower in recent years. The Ars Technica article focused on the utility scale solar generation. Counting that portion alone, solar generation has yet to surpass hydro's 1997 record of 356 TWh.
Solar panels are highly susceptible to leaching toxic metals into the environment around them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X2...
If they hadn't blew up the hydrodams, could they still say that?
It's also been a great year for oil production which has reached new record highs in the US! [0]
0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids.
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025
China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025
North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...
(no current oil commodity exposure)
> Oil is over
Then why has both global [0] and US [1] consumption been rising year-over-year for the last few years and projected to continue to rise [2]?
All those articles you're posting about short term changes in the dynamics of the oil market (except China, which is remains a net energy importer only because of oil, so they have a strong strategic reason to reduce oil depdence, though they still use quite a bit[3]).
Btw I'm not citing these things because I'm a big supporter of hydrocarbons or against green energy (which will continue to grow with or without boosters, since there is a real demand for that energy), but more so a realist pointing out that we are absolutely not making any progress in reducing our global need for hydrocarbons.
0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-countr...
1. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324
2. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#/media/File:Chin...
That's like asking "why is the train still moving even though the brakes are on"?
Not very long ago not only was consumption increasing every year, it was increasing at an increasing rate every year. And that increasing rate was itself increasing not so much time before that. We've reversed the 3rd derivate, and we've reversed the 2nd derivative. If the 2nd derivative is negative for sufficient time, the 1st derivative will itself go negative. Looks like it'll happen this year, but the year's not over yet.
The first derivative is consumption. The 0th derivative is amount of carbon in the air. For that to go down would require a carbon negative economy which I don't have much hope for.
It's more like renewables reducing velocity of increase in oil demand (for now). A few more pieces really need to come together, most oil displacement is EV and storage which is infrastructure problem.
Apart from PRC EV displacing 1mbd in oil. The other unmentioned stat PRC annual solar production, assume 30 year lifespan displaces about annual global oil consumption, i.e. 100mbd per day worth of oil. Their total solar output is 2x, what they produce, i.e. they produce enough solar to replace global oilm lng and a big chunk of coal in 10-15 years at full capacity. Storage hasn't caught up, true oil displacement depends on what storage lag will be, but likely short/medium term, not long term.
As for actual oil use, notice how PRC hammering EVs but still importing high % of oil, that's ongoing strategic reserver SPR and petchem play, i.e. even though they'll use less oil, they plan to store more (to mediate prices), and convert more into petchem products. So future is world where cheap renewables will displace oil from transportation to industr... because lots of energy = more industry = increase demand for fossil inputs. Which could mean less/same/more oil demand, unhelpful, I know.
Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
In several countries their freight trains are electric today. Trucks can be electric too, and a lot of shipping needn't run on fossil fuels although we're further off widespread commercial offerings than we are for trains or trucks which you can just buy today.
The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline.
I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.
It won't get cheaper than solar though.
Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest.
It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.
As long as thermodynamics allow, everything is possible.
The question always is who is gonna pay for it?
Societies have other priorities much higher on their list compared to energy cleanness.
"Natural" Oil is literally finite, we're currently burning everything which died over millions of years, when we say it isn't "renewable" that's not some vague idea about the planet not overheating (though to be sure if we heat the planet up and make it uninhabitable that would suck for us) but that literally it's running out.
So "who is gonna pay for it" is everybody, eventually.
We can literally build complex hydrocarbons from thin air. The problem is again cost (energy).
Whether we need them will be a function if they are financially sustainable. No profit, and they will close (as is the case with the Valero Benicia refinery in Northern California, shuttering April 2026). That is the linchpin to push fossil fuels to failure faster, find economically vulnerable and/or unsustainable fossil infrastructure and push it to failure (fossil supply chain death spiral). Because if no one will pay for it, it will not continue to exist, and the demand base to spread fixed costs across will only shrink into the future, pushing prices to unaffordability compared to non fossil alternatives.
(think in systems)
India has effectively electrified almost all of its rail transit. USA or other countries do not need to electrify all lines and the long tail is too long but even the major ones can bring in big benefits. No need to even get China in this equation.
To note, India also has three times domestic PV demand (~50GW/year) manufacturing capacity (~150GW/year) live.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2025
In December EV trucks outsold diesel in china
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
Trains are one of the easiest forms of transport to electrify. Yes, the US is going to drag its heels on doing so, but the rest of the world is already moving on.
Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.
Approximately 40% of global maritime trade by volume consists of transporting fossil fuels [1] [2], which will be less necessary as renewables and storage scale globally, replacing this consumption and the transportation needed.
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
Out of the stupid ideas for energy transition, ammonia takes the top spot as the stupidest.
The whole point of transitioning away from fossils is to protect human life, not to eradicate it in seconds.
> If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices.
Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
The US currently spends $1B/year on climate change related weather disasters. Waiting is not affordable nor sustainable. Gas cars already get a free ride by not paying for their externalities, the true price of gas, if externalities were to be priced in, would be closer to ~$8/gallon (some estimates are as high as $12/gallon, but I have specified the lower bound to be conservative in this context). The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to remediate harm incurred by not getting off of fossil fuels sooner. It is, simply put, stealing from the future.
> Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
We could subsidize electric car purchases and manufacturing, both vehicles and batteries. We could allow excellent, affordable Chinese EVs into the US to force US domestic legacy auto to compete on quality and prices (instead of protecting their profits). We could remove fossil fuel subsidies (~$760B/annually in the US) and direct those resources to speed electrification, low carbon generation, storage, and transmission (as China is doing, and becoming the world's first electrostate). But we don't, and those who are upset about inflation should take it up with those squeezing them for profits. The US could've made better policy, it was a choice to regress towards supporting combustion vehicles to prioritize those profits. Elections have consequences. If one doesn't believe in climate change or using policy to encourage electrification while reducing the immense subsidies provided to fossil fuels, certainly, one might disagree with this. That's a mental model issue, not a data and facts issue.
Ukraine and the CO2 levels are lucky that Russia pumping less oil is "good for America".
Genuinely some good news
This isn't a good thing unless it's paired with storage and transmission upgrades. Every time this kind of story posts I make this same comment and am met with the same probably well-meaning but ignorant responses. Solar generation is easy and cheap and simple. Actually getting that power where it needs to be, when it needs to be there is complex and expensive. You either need to store it or you need to transmit it very long distances, neither of which we can do effectively right now. Most of California routinely goes into negative power pricing - this is not the mark of a healthy system, it represents a massive inefficiency and destabilizing factor.
We need to pressure politicians to subsidize pump storage powerplants and massive transmission system upgrades (which means being ok with permitting new transmission lines) it's simply impossible to continue increasing the solar on the grid otherwise, we are rapidly approaching instability.
Check out the crazy amount of battery additions in California in 2025 and planned for 2026. It’s gunna be fine
That 'crazy' amount is not even scratching the surface of the surface of what we would need for a high-solar grid, let alone a majority solar grid. Not even within an order of magnitude. You don't have to take my word for it, the CAISO literally provides the data.
How much more do we need? 2x the capacity? 5x? 10x? The state has added a ridiculous amount of battery over the last couple years so it doesn't seem intractable
I remember looking at CAISO's graphs a few years ago and when the sun goes down we were basically completely dependent on imports and natty gas, especially for scaling up to demand around 6-7pm. Looking at today's graph, batteries were actually our top electricity source for a while around peak electricity time. Natty has been able to stay pretty flat, and even now its neck and neck with batteries
Exactly. You can see batteries displacing a huge amount of gas already, and their rollout is going to keep accelerating.
The state is up to 67% clean energy total for 2025, crazy progress in a decade
Happy to be a 5 year self generation participant contributing to these numbers. Given the very recent winter storms along the East Coast, that still has people without grid power at this very moment, such a residential generate and store system should be an eye opener to those impacted at times of greatest need. My own system was still generating during the storm as many erroneously believe the sun must be fully exposed to move electrons, nope.
I commented here in a recent HN energy post about my surrounding jurisdictions and the exploding utility costs per PJM that literally have governments suing each other. Just today one of those local jurisdictions announced a utility bill financial credit incentive for residents to attend a meeting to learn about what some already know intimately. Link is paywalled of course.
https://www.newarkpostonline.com/news/newarkers-can-earn-40-...
We are witnessing the accelerated adoption of local generation and storage driven by the economic costs of energy that has been directly and indirectly subsidized yet consumption is certainly not equal. As more and more move to self generate and store, per the meetings suggestion, the negative feedback loop is already in motion rising costs even more for those dependent on a centralized system.
For those that can see the light and where it is going; invest accordingly.
I was very disappointed to see the little 8% solar. I see that methane isn't budging. if a legacy industry is politically powerful enough, they can absolutely maintain a backwards situation.
Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The USA of yesteryear would have done this already and more. Sure other sources are required, but honestly we humans have to advance beyond burning dead things for fuel.
Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
As the Technology Connections dude highlighted, yearly, there are about 50 000 square miles used for ethanol fuel cultivation. We do much bigger and less efficient things for fuel. Distributing this all over the country seems much less pipe dreamy than you assert.
Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.
I trillion is going to dispersal in the AI black hole in the next couple years (in the US), I wish the same money were invested in the clean energy instead.
1 trillion disappears mysteriously into the USA economy every week.
that's a very nice target to cause a country wide blackout, just saying. It's probably better to built a thousand 10 square mile power plants.
> This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined
That isn't a lot. New Mexico alone can fit about 100 Rhode Islands. And NM isn't even the largest thinly-populated sunny state in the union.
White Sands Missile Range alone is ~3200 square miles.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Wh...
If you dedicated a single (average sized) county per state to solar you'd ~3-5x the land you need for current consumption.
What is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.
Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
Or alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere
There are 13,000 square miles of dedicated parking lots in the United States. Covering these gets you a double-whammy of keeping heat out of the ground and generating power.
I mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
It bothers me that you attribute this to Elon Musk. This has been obvious to everyone for 75 years or more. The lecturer in my freshman thermodynamics class mentioned it, 35 years ago. In 1999, NREL scientists writing in the journal Science under the title "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future" made the specific claim about 10000 square miles.
Thank you. I was not aware of prior references especially that it could be done with 10K square miles, until media reports of Elon's speech at Davos recently.
People of a certain world outlook will listen to Musk when they'll ignore more enlightened commentators. That's a good thing.
> Elon Musk mentioned [...]
He didn't say Elon was the origin.
Meanwhile he is burning jet fuel to power is AI cluster.
A clusterfuck of priorities.
Just imagine if the administration actually supported solar adoption!
Lmao because hydro in the US is so weak
Lakes feeding them are drying up.