Battery prices are collapsing and we are at an inflection point where electric vehicles will soon be more economical to purchase, drive and maintain for a much greater number of people. This is as inevitable as the phaseout of coal.
Solar panels also seems to be on a tipping point
Oh it tipped a few years ago. It’s just still being implemented. There may be less startup to ramping up fossil fuel plants still, but solar is cheaper to build and operate
So I guess what kind of tipping point we’re talking about, I meant we’ll soon be drowning in cheap solar panels, it’s just as you said not yet at capacity.
I looked at adding solar to my house 6-7 years ago and it was going to cost $60k. The return on investment would have taken 25-30 years.
What does it cost these day?
To give you an Australian perspective here are some current indicative prices for solar installations over here. https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/cost/
Yeah, I was shopping for lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries maybe two years ago and was looking at spending over £1000 per battery. Now those batteries are not much over £100 and prices still seem to be falling.
What would one use lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries for? I’m not familiar with those
LiFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is heavier than traditional Lithium Ion batteries for the same amount of energy storage, but doesn’t degrade when discharged to zero the way traditional Lithium Ion does.
That looks like autocorrect or text-to-speech mangled ‘lithium iron phosphate’
Well, you know…sometimes you just need a vibrator that can go a continuous month between recharges…
Sodium ion batteries are also supposedly gearing up to be a solid li-ion alternative in the next 2-3 years. Not as energy dense yet but they’re closing the gap.
Fingers crossed that pans out.
Not only that, but lithium sulfur is coming too.
I heard this as well and am sweating the anticipation. They make another breakthrough on density and it’ll blow li-io out of the water, at least for on-site storage. Would be crazy to see backup diesel generators replaced by batteries.
I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.
All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.
About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.
I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.
And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.
Unless you live in the US where tarrifs will keep that from being a reality.
There’s too much money in renewables for rich people. The tariffs may or may not happen, but the renewable switch is a runaway train, and almost entirely in the country.
On the electricity futures market, wind producers regularly sell their power for negative prices (paying transmission companies to take their power) because it’s so cheap for them to make, with such negligible overhead; since the government subsidies are based on the mWh they produce, they can sell it at a loss and still make money. But even if those subsidies go away, renewables can still easily undercut every other producer on the grid.
That’s just one example. The same tipping point is approaching fast all over just about every industry. Obama and Biden got the renewable energy industry over the hump of research and infrastructure outlay, so now Tr*mp gets to take the credit for their work while it all falls into place; and because the rich people are benefiting from it financially, they’re going to protect the industry.
The tariffs may or may not happen
The 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs already happened in September. Joe Biden announced them in May and they kicked off already. I don’t expect Trump to change anything with that.
I’m talking about batteries, specifically. And the US is decades behind on batteries.
Definitely true, though Elon paid enough money to Trump that he’s probably going to make sure there’s a cutout in any tariffs for Tesla’s batteries (which are largely made by CATL in China). Besides, cheap power means that even with tariffs raising the prices of batteries, BEVs are still going to be worth driving.
Yeah, but that will be true for the electric cars made in the coming years, not the ones made in the past few years. People were right to be put off by the prices.
And even then, will these new cheap batteries be durable? I worry a lot about all these EVs becoming unusable in 10 years because the batteries are ruined, just like my 10 year old laptop
People who didn’t lease will lose their shirts but the price of new cars is the primary driver for the price of used cars. New, cheap, and more useable EVs will make used ones cheap.
As to the reliability, it remains to be seen. Considering the size of a vehicle I think an aftermarket will pop up for refurbishing and replacing batteries like it has for the earliest modern EVs in the us, the leaf.
Thanks to COVID and speeding mRNA research we are at the cusp of curing many auto-immune diseases. I’m 47 with a kid with diabetes and another with celiac. I’m confident both will be cured in my lifetime
Fuck yeah. Science, bitch!
I am about to go on a date!
How did it go?
Well, I was worried that I had forgotten the art of dating, but it seems that there will be another! I don’t know how it will end up, but for now I’m happy!
I was worried that I had forgotten the art of dating
Peepee go in vajayjay. You’ve got this.
Have a great time and be sure to tell lemmy all about it afterwards!
Hopefully we’re about to have dozens of Luigis. That’s something to celebrate.
Nintendo should see that Luigi is trending and make some more games. For… Reasons.
A Nintendo Hitman clone where you play as Luigi and have to take revenge on Bowser’s cronies because they stopped Mario from getting treatment when he needed it.
I might be getting a new job which is better in every way. Only a couple people know about it.
Edit: I didn’t get the job. I am not taking it well.
Hey!! Congrats!!! That’s really nice!!! What will you do in this new job?
Reception, with some managerial responsibilities. There’s room to move up.
I have a Bachelor’s in Game Programming. The world doesn’t need another game programmer right now, but my experience managing projects came in handy.
I currently work in grocery, min wage, as a janitor/stocker.
Nice!!! Not only is this a nice job it also gives you contacts, something that can be really really powerful when looking for a new job as some people can just make a new position for you, literally how my dad went from a reception worker to his accounting job when he graduated!! I wish you a great job and that things work out amazingly for you!!!
Holy shit awesome man! Even if it doesn’t pan out don’t lose hope! I got rejected on 3 different positions and thought I was just not the cut. 7 years later after landing the 4th and I’m a completely different person. NEVER give up! You and your future are worth it. I promise.
There’s a bloke on Youtube who actually purveys good news on a regular basis if anyone’s interested: https://www.youtube.com/@itsSamBentley
Thanks for sharing this!
People now about solar but I think most people don’t know that the 21st century will become dominated by solar really fast. The growth will be exponential and in the coming decade we’ll really see it happening at a ridiculous pace.
It’ll also be really cheap and complemented by cheap storage. It always sounds like it’s 50 years away but in reality electrification is coming in so fast and cheap where the developing world will leap frog fossil fuels.
If you’re a homeowner you can almost certainly buy solar in a manner where the monthly financing will be similar to what you save in monthly electric bills. So it’s a wash.
This year.
The difference is that electric bills will go up, while the financing terms stay the same.
Looked into this a few years ago and you could have said the same then. The problem was the deal with the financing had all these weird caveats when you looked into the details like you didn’t own the panels, and any cost would transfer with the sale of the house, it was like a forever rental with no upgrades ever.
When we get to the point that you can get solar added, and own everything, and can pay for it without financing with a positive ROI in 3 years, that’s the tipping point.
I’m projecting inflation adjusted prices of energy to go down in the coming years as well as financing costs. The energy market is stabilising with the Ukraine war and central bank rates are also going down right now. Outlook is pretty good economically right but Covid and Ukraine really threw a wrench into the works and fucked up 4 years so far
Yeah i wouldn’t be surprised if the next 4 years saw natural gas and coal plants being torn down because they can’t be subsidized cheaper than solar.
5 words never written in sequence by a utility provider:
“We are lowering your rates”
All those early access games I bought will get updates in 2025.
I’m now on a Early Access conveyor belt. Every few months, something I’ve been waiting for gets a new update. I got like 10 games that I rotate between, with new ones being added and old ones getting dropped off.
And they’re all big with their community support.
Im very excited.
You may not be getting many upvotes but I feel you man. I had one come along for me recently and it was pure bliss. Was so great I bought a copy at full retail for my kid just to make sure I was additionally supporting them (and they wanted it but that’s a bonus lol)
The corporate real estate market is going to tank, people are going to turn their empty office building caused by everyone working from home into apartments, and rental prices are going to crash because of how desperate the corps are to bring in any money. Once rental market tanks, housing market tanks, and all those massive investment firms buying up neighborhoods are going to see their investment shrink like a cold Wang doodle. Expect crying ceo’s and a massive government bailout in the next 4-7 yes for this exact scenario.
I know turning office buildings into apartments seems like a fantastic idea on the surface but there are a LOT of reasons this doesnt work, ranging from fire code issues, utility service locations and access and HVAC design. Sorry.
How is that good? Rich people will get away with it and we will pay the price.
Jubilee is coming. Whether that’s good or not in your book probably depends on whether you are a devout Catholic, but its certainly a rare event.
I could think of s couple of contexts that this would apply. Lets see if the lord pulls through…
Sounds like they should do it more often.
you are not about to be kicked in the nads by me…
…but one of you will be.
Humanity will probably die out in the next hundred years and the planet will finally be able to recover, even if it has to start over from microbes to get there.
Well this only good news for Russian bootlickers but the foundation’s of geopolitics becoming more and more true.
What does that mean?
I think russia is going down hard (20 jan being their sole hope to salvage their kleptocracy) and with it the evil influence in many parts of the world => good news.
I would recommend if you wish to sit down and read the book, it reads like a mad mans manifesto on how to take over europe and china but putin is using it as a playbook. It’s available on the internet archive in english to read. Everything over the past few years is going to their plan, and the instability of civility in the USA is apart of that. killing CEO’s and people being pushed to brink of using violence to send their message or push progress forward, bringing a domino effect of the US goverment under donlad trump revolting and causing a 2nd civil war. Eurpoe should not rely on the US for defence, and should focus on their own.
Ya, that’s quite clear.
But we’re waking up, I mean Europe, the Kremlin forgets the numerous times when we kicked their ass.
Lots of “normal” people also starts to understand that lots and lots of bad things are backed by russia (libya, iran, argentina, cuba, rise if the right wing in EU/USA, hate and division, electoral interference, the list goes on) whicb mean they are out in the open. Also the ruble has collapsed, the soviet arms stockpiles are running out and so forth, russia is going under.
Well, in the northern hemisphere, we’ll start getting progressively more daylight in 6 days.
Oh hell yeah
Wait, already? I want dark. Me need dark.
Keep your blinds down then, but the rest of us praise the sun!
Night man, ahhEHHHahhhhh!!!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!
I only praise the man-made sun.
It’ll still continue to feel dark until early March so don’t worry.
Yea this is my first winter in the northern hemisphere, I was warned about the dark being unbearable, but it’s been pretty good so far…
It’s harder on the upswing for me. Maybe it’s because January and February seem to stretch on after the holidays, but I don’t really get tired of winter until later (luckily).
It depends how north are you
Absolutely, but unless you’re in Antarctica, it can get much more extreme in the North than South. Tierra del Fuego is south of Australia and South Africa, but it’s closer to the equator than the southern tip of Norway.
By like 2° latitude… But yeah… Nobody lives below Tierra del Fuego all year (scientists maybe?) but plenty of people live North of there (Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Finland etc.).
Source that there is a Finland?
Thank fuck. I hate the thing where the sunrise is at 10am, and sunset is at 2pm.
I can take the cold. I like seasons. I despise the short days.
I love it. For about 2 weeks. Then I just want to go to Spain until May.
Spain is still too far north. I want to dive into liquid magma till May.
Booooo!
Vampires hate this one weird trick
What, not being in highschool? That tends to put them off their feed, I hear. 🤢🙃
Daytime energy is soon going to be free in much of the world. The advances in green tech, especially solar and batteries, are real. Much faster progress than even the optimists were predicting a decade ago. The revolution is reaching a tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining and requires no state subsidies. I am not a tech utopian, and this alone will not save us. But there’s no denying it’s good news. It’s all happening far too late but it does look like humans are going to kick their fossil habit after all.
Inconvenient footnote: thank China.
Optimistic of you to assume pricing is cost-plus not willingness-to-pay. US utilities (and their foreign counterparts) will only too gladly keep charging you
Agreed. In theory that problem can be dealt with by properly regulated competition.
But regulation is the enemy and only serves to harm the poor, poor multinational conglomerates!
Can’t wait to get charged $0.50/kWh by PGE for energy they generate for free, weeee.
People can talk shit on China from a geopolitical stance and I’ll agree with them, but yeah, they picked up the slack where other countries were lacking when it came to green progression. Technically our (US) own fault too. Greed ruling over progression really fucked us.
Best I can do is more bitcoins
Capitalism only encourages innovation when its profitable. Its a bit of a flaw.
It’s gotten so good that China might be restricting output to keep the prices high…
(their onshore wind, and pumped hydro storage, are also great success stories, as is the EV industry there)
Indeed. China is such a paradox. An absolute anathema in terms of culture and politics. It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little. And yet, and yet. Without China we would be royally screwed. They are pulling the weight of the green transition basically alone. So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
Tiananmen Square was not that long ago. There are lots of living people who would have seen their fellow students get crushed by tanks and rinsed down a drain.
That will keep a generation and their children quiet. Their children have also now seen how risings are punished via Hong Kong.
I don’t think it’s even possible to imagine what you would do having seen your government enact that kind of violence on your peers. So I certainly don’t judge.
In a way it’s even scarier than that. Most younger Chinese do not even know those things happened. I can confirm this incredible fact from personal experience. At this point “Tiananmen Square 1989” has more meaning to the average educated Westerner than it does over there. It has been scrubbed from history.
It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little.
This assumes that they have an alternative to authoritarianism that they could enact if they wanted. For some reason, the authorities don’t allow that. And the authorities also don’t like when people talk about it, so it’s difficult to discuss and convince others that authoritarianism is bad.
True but it’s not like China has never decided enough was enough and replaced their leadership by force
Yes sure but China has never been anything remotely like a Western democracy. It would be difficult to keep the lid on a billion people if they really wanted to live differently. Political culture runs deep.
If they want to defer to authority, they can just keep voting in the ruling party. Democracy doesn’t mean no choices.
Voting? Democratic elections are literally not a thing in China, at least not higher than the level of the village. There are no political parties other than the Communist Party. But for Western democracies I do agree. We have no excuses.
My later comment was misunderstood. If being ruled by strong Communist leaders is the “political culture” of China, then fine. Give them a choice every few years and they will keep selecting that.
But we all know that the “revolution” needs to maintained by not giving the people the choice. If given a choice, the people might be “fooled” by Western influence and select someone other than the Communists. So the Communists pick all the candidates and then let the people choose only between them.
The fact is that the “political culture” that supposedly backs authoritarianism would not survive free and open elections. The political culture being unwaveringly Communist is a sham and a lie.
Voting is absolutely meaningless in Xi’s China. But I gotta give it to them for their solar panel work. Too bad it’s all about to jump in price due to the idiotic tariffs.
Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism,
So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
You just did, according to .ml users, because ACkShuLly cHiNa iSnT aN AuThoRitArIaN CounTRy
Joke’s on them: not only authoritarian, but capitalist authoritarian.
Yes, but, we depend on fossil fuels for far more than just energy. We still get most of our plastics from them, and most of our fertilizer, without which we can’t feed most of the developed countries. And while renewables are great for stationary use, we still don’t have anything with the energy density of fossil fuels for cars, shipping, air travel, and cargo. And, whether anyone thinks it’s a good use or not, war is entirely, inefficiently, and intensely run on oil.
There are a lot of other issues entirely unrelated to power grid energy production we have to solve first, the most challenging being our own aggressive human nature. We’re a long way from kicking the oil habit.
The energy density of batteries just keeps increasing, for cars at least it’s now good enough. I agree completely about the rest but this was meant to be a happy thread! I agree with OP that we need to talk about good news too sometimes.
Fair point about positive things; I just think it’s important to not delude ourselves.
Completely agree. Self-delusion is such a temptation and the danger is real.
Is there a good place to ask about independent (non-grid-connected) solar for an otherwise grid-connected structure? I’d love to set something like this up, but can’t find any systems which don’t require wiring into the gird.
Why would you pass up on the free money of selling the power? You’re probably looking for a hybrid system if you just want to keep the lights on during a service outage. Or I guess you can just build an off grid system and wire it to a generator transfer switch if you want to power your house circuits but only during an outage.
Most half decent solar installers can help either way.
Mostly because I am not in a place, financially or home-wise, to install a full grid-connected system. I’m just looking for something that I can use to charge enough battery to run a lamp, fan, charge devices, or other such similar light loads on a daily basis. It won’t bring my power bill to zero, but it will chip away at it.
Oh so not really even your home circuits then. Just get something like a jackery, ecoflow, or bluetti. I’ve had a bluetti and ecoflow and recommend an ecoflow product. If you really really wanted to you could power an in wall circuit with one but it would be pretty jank.
I’ve set up an off grid solar system out of necessity. Used to be an electrician so I know a good bit (but not everything by any means). What are your questions I can maybe point you in the right direction.
Based on your initial question, it depends on local zoning. You can likely legally grid tie a set up and have a battery backup. I think if you want to be legal I’d go that route.
If you want I think you could set up a completely separate system in a more sneaky fashion that is completely isolated from the grid / your existing house circuitry. But when grid tying (including into your house circuitry) you have to be pretty safe because that power can go upstream and feed the grid or the house when workers think the power is off, which is obviously very dangerous and could get you in a lot of trouble if it went wrong.
Engineer here, so I’m aware of the fundamentals of “how not to kill yourself with electricity”. Anything tying into the grid I’m definitely calling a professional for.
But no, I’m not in a financial or property situation to install a grid-connected system, so I was imagining a “balcony solar” kit that’d just charge a small battery bank I could run some lights, a fan, or some similar low-load devices off of. I don’t know if such a thing exists (or if it’s a smart idea), but I’d like to look into it and find out.
Yeah for sure. You could get an all in one inverter battery bank, but I prefer piecemeal systems because of repairability/replacing parts/upgrading parts.
Basically you’d get a battery, when I was shopping around I found eg4 or gyll batteries to be the cheapest. Small Texas company. That could have changed. Some ppl make their own or use them from a car, but soldering plus making a management system seemed like more than I wanted to deal with.
You need a way to charge the battery (panels etc) and also a way to get the power into the battery safely and efficiently (charge controller).
And then you need a way to get energy out of the battery to your apploances. You can get DC appliances that match your battery voltage or get an inverter.
For all of those parts you need to run some simple calculations for efficiency and compatibility and use case (how big of a system etc), as well as some fuses and possibly lightning arrestors and grounding.
Totally doable and a good bit of fun
I bet the Solarpunk and homesteading / permaculture communities might have some ideas on this!
Best ask in a more specialized forum. Personally I rent so I have to take what I’m given.
This IS good news!
I hope I live to see a modular, upgradable, repairable laptop with a ridiculously ludicrous battery life. (Without it being powered by some sort of highly volatile fusion core or something Lol)
You wish, if we keep going towards everything has a battery power demand is only going to go up
Sure, but energy efficiency is always improving, distribution and storage are always improving. And the full electrification of transport (which is what you seem to be alluding to) is not going to happen overnight.
