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And with battery prices falling, the intermittency issues that made LNG useful despite the drawbacks is gradually becoming much less of a problem too.
Plus it’s pretty easy to simply shift the time of use to when there’s the most clean capacity online (and this is easily encouraged with variable electricity rates)
I wouldn’t say ‘easily’. I live in a country with a so-called ‘liberalized’ electricity market, and although I’m enough of a software developer to have custom scripts to pull the daily market hourly prices, I still wouldn’t call it easy to schedule around. And most people really don’t have the kind of options my expertise grants me.
And this is 2024 numbers. Gas is more expensive now that the strait of Hormuz is closed for a good long time
good time to plug the technology connections video
When is it ever a bad time?
good time to plug the technology connections video
What do the lobbyists get out of the solar panels? How do the solar panels generate constant fees?
There are other expenses and location also plays a big role, but it is certainly true that solar is much cheaper when all is said and done. Hence why the energy transition continues in the US even without subsidies.
A) only one of those technologies is burning the planet… kinda big part of the equation
B) here are the numbers for australia:
source: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Electricity-transition/GenCost
C) see A
You forgot battery storage (200 usd/kWh) and non-generation use for natgas.
It’s important for full conversion of the grid, but for just cost of energy, it isn’t needed. While 100% of the generated energy is used during the day there’s nothing left to store. I think a lot of places are still in this situation. But yeah, the more solar you build the more important that cost becomes.
The latter will still benefit from cutting down use a lot.
Sure, the less methane burned in peaker plants and AI DC gas turbines, the better.
It is blatantly not motivated by the economy (except the few vested interests).
It is mostly about power.
I’m solar fan #1, but 5x that price would still be a good deal on panels
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Batteries exist you donkey
The first 100M you buy the panels. The second 100M you buy the batteries for the panels.
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This is stupid, not because it’s untrue, but because you cannot manifest those solar panels out of thin air, or install them on a whim.
Refueling existing infrastructure is trivial and expected.
Solar panels last decades. If you told me I could fuel my car for the next twenty years by paying one year’s worth of fuel up front, I would be that ‘Take My Money’ meme.
Also, they now make plug-in solar panels that plug into a standard wall socket. So you actually can install them on a whim.
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This is an ignorant comment if I have ever seen one. Surprisingly, you don’t have to pay for everyone’s energy bill. You would need to harvest about a million people’s lifetime productivity a year to pay for that.
Edit: they editted their comment to be less insane.
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I am not even pro fossil fuels.
angry German energy minister noises
only problem with me personally about this, is that i’m stuck with gasoline using car, i dont have money to buy 50k electric car :/
Ikr? I could have had $10k BYD Dolphin, but we haaaad to do the tariff wars.
I will offhandedly mention that ebikes are getting pretty good/cheap nowadays, but that’s obviously not going to work for everyone.
20k EUR would get me a Dolphin Surf over here, Dolphin is over 30k. We also have tariffs because the EU has an auto industry to protect from cars being sold under cost of manufacturing too. Dacia Spring can be had for like 15k.
It’s not a bad deal for the average person looking at a vehicle they don’t have to work on, but 2k for a used Audi gets me a significantly more comfortable car that’s also more powerful and has twice as much cargo space. I don’t even like Audi, it was just the cheapest 6 cylinder diesel wagon around with isofix at the time. Also the list price might’ve been 2k, I actually paid less because it was ugly as sin (in terms of paintwork, not the model itself).
The economics don’t work the same if you’re incapable of maintaining a 20 year old German executive car at home (which most people aren’t), but for some of us, ICE vehicles are DIRT cheap because you can get a 20 year old one that really has 90% of the tech you’d want in a car, and is missing all the stuff you don’t, parts are cheap, and doing your own work on a car is as much therapeutic as it is work. And the reason I specifically go for these vehicles is that they’re cheap because people are afraid of the complexity and unreliability, but I’m familiar with them and know how to keep them on the road indefinitely without going bankrupt.
So part of me wishes I had an EV, but the other part of me says I’d be paying 10-20X as much for a vehicle with inferior driving characteristics (I don’t mean acceleration, I mean the suspension setup in budget EVs, I have well-designed multi-link front and rear, adaptive dampers and it’s all on air springs) and less space. I’d gain a fancy touch screen, but that actively repels me.
Now I did test drive an Audi E-Tron as those are available for cheap (for a big EV SUV), but I was very disappointed with the comfort in that. Literally not comparable to my 20 year old A6 Allroad, which isn’t even most comfortable car I’ve owned. But as EVs have undergone rapid development in the last 5 or 6 years, I think that there’s finally stuff available that I’d actually like to own. In 5 more years when they’re depreciated to hell and the powertrain and battery warranty starts running out.
Cars in general are the problem and even if they all went electric they’d be bad. (But cities would be much quieter and they are hella fun to drive.)
If you’re able to use a bicycle for some of your trips instead of a car, that’s a good change. (And if you’re not then you might not even be able to use an EV car if you could afford it. It takes way longer to charge a battery than to fill a gas tank.)
I don’t know anything about the situation in the US, but you get great second hand EVs for around 12.000€ here in Germany. Combustion is cheaper to buy but gets more expensive over time. It has over 250 moving parts, EVs have like 7.
problem with second hand ev is that if the battery has to be replaced, might as well just buy new car entirely
Nearly all cars I tried had SOH over 90%. The car I bought is from 2021 and has 94,9% battery health. Buy a 25€ OBD2-dongle and read it when you test-drive it. If the owner cared just a little, battery health is not a problem. Don’t let fossil disinformation scare you.
what do you mean cared a little? what affects the battery most? I live in finland and at winters it can get -30c here and only place for car i have is outside. I also worry that i myself might wear the battery down really fast due to not being able to store the car properly. I also need to occasionally do long trips and when i visit my mother, i think the closest charging spot is at least 10km away so i might get stuck easily too if i run out of battery.
I really REALLY would prefer ev, i hate having to pay stupid prices for gas, taxes and even maintenance since combustion engine wears down much faster and worse. But the reality for me is that there just isnt enough infrastructure for ev in north finland for me to use ev without having to worry more than with my current car. I guess rich people dont have any problems no matter where they are, considering how many teslas i have seen, but i’m not one of those. + i just switched my car so my funds for it are expended for forseeable future unless i get work, which in finland seems about as easy to do than winning in lottery if you are not right type of person.
Here’s a study about battery health. Bottom line is, charging from 0% to 100% gives you 500 life cycles until it’s at 70% health. Charging from 20% to 70% gives you 6.000 life cycles. That’s is a huge difference and you should keep that in mind.
I don’t know how low temperatures affect battery health. But ask around, aren’t EVs super popular in Finland?
at least cold weather drains battery, not sure how it affects the health in general but i dont think it does it any good. The people who have ev are most likely those who can also afford heated and closed space for their car. At least i have seen many teslas all around so it would make sense if there are even more evs because tesla is only car i can definitely tell is ev.
I wish evs had somekind of “emergency” battery that would charge the main battery if it gets too low so it would protect it from getting too empty.
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difficult to justify invading other countries though for their solar, that’s why we need to stay on oil, to prop up defence industries and provide education pathways for the poor /s
i guess you could argue too much sun falls on Iran ?
This is a climate group though and yet the economic arguments in some of these comments are bordering on insane :(
difficult to justify invading other countries though for their solar
Recurring profits.
Not that difficult.
You still need petrochemicals for the material refining and production process of solar cells. They’re better, but not as amazing as some people seem to think.
Thanks a lot, captain obvious. We did the calculations, thanks for repeating fossil industry propaganda.
It’s not propaganda, it’s an unfortunate fact of almost all industrial processes that they require oil based products at one stage or another. I don’t like it either but until/if these technologies can rely on renewable alternatives for such processes, they’re not really green or renewable, and neither are the electronics that they power. Everyone seems to conveniently forget this. If you want true green technology and renewable energy, you’re going to need to give up industry altogether. Which we’ll probably end up doing when the coming climate catastrophe forces us all back to the stone age.
Even if they do, they massively cut down on total pollution. They don’t magically produce more pollution in one manufacturing process, than all the oil they are replacing that will be burned. That’s nutzo.
As I already stated, yes, they are better than say, a coal burning power plant. I’m not saying otherwise. But I’m pointing out that solar panels and electronics in general still require many polluting and non-renewable resources and processes to create. And solar panels wear out eventually, like everything else. So yes, you’re burning less fuel, but it’s not “zero emission” or “sustainable” (currently) for their production or their eventual replacement. I’m just annoyed by the way these technologies get pushed as an almost magical alternative to fossil fuels when fossil fuels and chemicals are still required to make them.
And when they wear out they can largely be recycled
pretty much anything is far better than setting something on fire exactly one time
That’s like saying, you cannot actually go to school, do homework and pass tests if you only reach a score of 99/100 points.
