Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion
- Thread starter FairAndUnbiased
- Start date
That's not gonna be a factor until exponential growth stops. Solar panels can last 20+ years, even installation from 10 years ago is negligible compared to today.
This really does prove that Trump is his own agent and what makes him so unpredictable and dangerous. The free market is clearly in favor of renewables, his own private group of tech oligarchs should want a strong renewables industry too, considering how much power demand growth is expected for A.I. Renewables are the really the only energy source that can keep up with such rapid growth in demand. And of course Musk and his EVs. But nope, Trump does what he wants.
This won't kill the renewable industry in America, the free market favors it too much. But it will slow it down a lot, especially with how unstable American business policy is, complete 180 degree policy changes every 4 years is not good for business. More importantly, it's not just Trump of course, a decent sized portion of his base, from governors, to small business owners, to your average joe will also throw up roadblocks for renewables and EVs wherever possible, just to own the Libs. Which is how we get shit like this and rolling coal. They will just grow more emboldened under Trump.
China already has a massive lead and America shot itself in the foot, again.
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IMO this is one of the most consequential decisions of Trumpism/MAGA... A relatively good discussion about US "petrostate" vs China "electrostate"
distributed solar is huge in China. about 42% of total installation. btw, NEA numbers on power generation don't count the smaller power generation sources like distributed solar and wind.
what needs to be done before it is practical?
Energy storage is so cheap that there's an overcapacity of them, this is actually so crazy. solar + storage is going to replace fossil fuel a lot faster than we once thought. Also, this shows how massive Chinese electricity consumption growth is that additional solar power is used up before it could even be stored.
Energy output needs to be higher than energy input, for one. Right now the output/input ratio often dubiously use the energy input of the step directly before the fusion reaction (e.g. the energy of the laser in an ICF) rather than the whole system energy requirement to calculate the ratio. Oftentimes that step is only like ~1% of the actual input, resulting in misleading headlines claiming positive energy gain when it's nowhere near that.
That's insane when you think about it, 277GW+79GW=356GW= equivalent of over 15 Three Gorges Dams!
This wouldn't be a surprise to anyone but China has well surpassed any solar panel installation plans it had when 14/5 was formed.