Yeah but you have to pay for the sunshine every year that you use to power the panels. And you have to build pipelines to transport that sunshine from the faraway places where it’s developed, and sometimes you have to liquefy it a load it onto gigantic tanker ships and carry it overseas, and there’s always a risk of it exploding and…oh, wait. I’m thinking of the gas. Never mind.
To be fair, NG was sunshine at one point.
The propagandized will continue parroting their fossil fuel talking points and will continue to vote for the politicians that collect fossil fuel money.
Why do you say it like it’s an eternal inevitability? Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda because it has to be maintained at a certain pressure to effectively change someone’s behavior. The solution to the propaganda problem, then, is to combat propaganda, not wring our hands in despair. We’ve been busting up propaganda rings since the dawn of the written word, it can be done. Just needs people to do it.
Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda
Your mistake is believing that they are spending much money. It’s actually a small fraction of the money they make from burning the planet, miniscule if compared to the amounts accumulated over decades, and it’s also the easiest option. They could also just buy politicians who are incredible cheap but still more expensive than the ongoing media desinformation campaign that mostly runs on its own because the clickbait industry journalism has become runs on stories the propaganda victims want to hear.
I guess it depends on what you call much. influence campaigns are clearly profitable, at least some of the time, but just because the profits are greater doesn’t mean the costs aren’t still significant.
And, I think the more active people are in countering propaganda, the more expensive it becomes to achieve the same effect. I think just believing the effects of propaganda are inevitable (and acting on that belief) has the effect of making deception that much more economical and effective for those who wish to deceive for their own selfish ends.
I think the more active people are in countering propaganda
Oh, so you never actually tried to talk to those lost propaganda victims conditioned to reject facts (because otherwise they wouldn’t fall obvious bullshit anyway) and can’t be convinced of reality anymore?
Of course I have. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s a fair description of most of my family and most of my hometown, I would be hard-pressed not to.
They already moved on to different tactics like restricting the ability to connect solar to the grid or simply burying all applications in red tape for years.
they are going pretty hard in maintaining gas and oil production
Yes, but have you considered that using renewables means you’re gay? Checkmate liberals.
BuT wHaTaBoUt WhEn ItS cLoUdY!!
What about just night?
At night I run off my battery. I can’t go completely off-grid, the days are simply too short in winter, but for like 70% of the year I get free electricity.
In the winter months it still gives me an advantage because I can buy energy at the lowest price point of the day (i.e. when demand is lowest relative to production).
It also allows me to sell the over-production of my solar panels at the most expensive part of the day. And it’s all handled automatically by the software in my solar system. It takes into account the prices over the day, the predicted energy usage during the night, the weather prediction for the next day and uses that to determine when and how much to sell back to the grid and/or when to buy electricity from the grid.
We could use the excess power to bank carbon, then if we need more power we can burn that same carbon.
Edit: This isn’t to be efficient, it’s to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reverse global warming. I meant that being able to use it as emergency fuel would just be a perk.
If you have the space. Solar needs a lot more space for the same power output.
Sticking coal power generation on your roof, are ye?
We have space on our houses, to protect us from rain and sun.
Btw, why are never company buildings solar required? They have vastly more space.
It’s not the same, since it’s not dispatchable. So you need gas turbines or very large battery systems for backup, which isn’t exactly helping with that upfront capital.
The backup for turbines and coal plants failing is more turbines / older, less efficient turbines though, right? If our existing power infrastructure is spun up overnight only, that’s a huge improvement. Turbines for flexible capacity will always be a thing, but solar to provide baseline capacity is just good business.
There’s another strategic benefit: batteries have a fixed cost that doesn’t rely on a variable input cost. With current events in the strait, countries without abundant natural gas are advantaged because they’re less reliant on geopolitical conditions. This is why we’ve seen such growth of solar in china, which is not oil-rich, and was already importing a lot of coal.
Solar was the cheapest source of power YEARS ago. Solar plus storage was also the cheapest form of dispatchable power years ago, but for some reason these idiots are just reporting it now.
What about the absurd amount of land it takes?
How much energy can be produced on global land used for liquid biofuels: 32000 TWh for PV vs 1400 TWh biofuels for transport:
Remember that you can still use the land for a more useful agricultural crop with higher¹ or similar² yield³ with agrivoltaics
You can also put panels over parking lots. USA alone has more parking lot land area than some countries:
Biofuels: the least efficient form of solar power one could possibly invent.
