https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... ("US Interconnection Queues Analysis 2023")

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960 ("Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022")

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/02/u-s-to-deploy-550-gw-... ("U.S. to deploy 550 GW of new renewables by 2030")

China deployed more solar last year than total US solar generation capacity, so while work, it can be done.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-installed-sol... ("The country built in excess of 216 gigawatts (GW) of solar power this year, the data indicated, underscoring the scale and pace of China's solar build out.")

Currently, the U.S. PV manufacturing industry has the capacity to produce PV modules to meet nearly a third of US domestic demand.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing

The second link is interesting since it covers actual generated energy. The others are kind of convoluted and need to be more clear on what the capacity measurement is since most renewables have significantly lower capacity factors than nuke, gas and coal.

Which is why the battery uptake mentioned in this piece is of note. It firms renewables and steals grid service revenue from thermal generators. Pulls the uptake trajectory of renewables closer to vertical.

Only one coal fired generator in the US is currently economical to run vs new renewables. You don’t have to match capacity factor, it’s about economics; if renewables can run often enough cheap enough, it makes other generators uneconomical even if they have superior capacity factors. It’s why nuclear is on life support in the US.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/end-of-co... | https://archive.today/2owbd

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/30/us-coal-more...

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/14/texas-shatters-own-sola... ("Texas Shatters Own Solar Power Record, Weird Political Situation Or Not")

I think wind dominates hydropower now

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Say you don't understand exponential growth without saying you don't understand exponential growth.

There's no way solar can grow geometrically for long. It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow. Land is limited; sunlight is limited. It has a hard, hard limit.

Unlike many other kinds of power generation, which are land-frugal and work 24 hours a day.

So, let's rethink who doesn't understand growth.

Looking it up solar/renewables take up surprisingly less space than expected

Area required for all renewables: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

Area required for just solar: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

> It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow.

Now you're really showing you haven't bothered to do basic arithmetic. Land use is not any sort of real limit to PV solar, especially in the US.

I suggest you check your assertions for validity before you commit them to writing.

It's easy to wave hand and claim 'we have plenty of space.'

The only places it makes sense to put solar are level unobstructed ground-level stable dry cheap tracts near grids, with access for maintenance. And good weather (hurricanes and snow are a no-go).

It's all in the details. The idealism that accompanies Go Solar! are not helping the conversation. We want to move forward (which I support), then let's be serious about it, not just enthusiastic.

The breathless articles touting big numbers for {marginal activity} are fun and exciting. Just, lets take a breath and understand what they really mean and where we really are.

But I already said all that. I really don't know why I'm responding to a troll, who's only posts are to criticise and belittle. Not moving the conversation forward either.

I suggest you provide actual evidence for your assertion. You will not be able to, because it is false. The land area in the US is enormous and land cost is only a small fraction of the cost of a PV field. And, of course, grids can be extended as needed.

The trolling is entirely yours.

Again with the hand-waving. "Land is big!" is no kind of argument or evidence. It all comes down to cost and practicality. Energy is not some game, its business.

And with dropping panel cost, land is the last remaining hard nut in the equation. Not a small fraction, a large one, and becoming larger.

As for understanding math, the earth is not getting any bigger. That limit cannot be beat, no matter how breathless the rhetoric.

It would take 526 solar farms the size of the Solar Star solar farm to power the approx 131 million households in the USofA.

https://8billiontrees.com/solar-panels/largest-solar-farm

That's 526 x 13 km^2 of area (plus grid connection) or 6,838 km^2.

Or one large square of 83 x 83 km.

Or less than a third the size of Anna Creek Cattle Station in Australia.

See map: https://australianscaffolds.com.au/australias-largest-cattle...

For comparison, recall that the land area of Australia is more or less the same as the land area of mainland contiguous USofA.

Very encouraging!

Now, to find that level unobstructed ground-level stable dry cheap tracts near grids, with access for maintenance. Near where folks need the electricity. And the land isn't ecologically significant. And remember, storage or it's not helping for shit.

There are so many obstacles left! So many reasons it will slow down once the enthusiasm and price supports have dried up. Like everything else we've ever done.

I would have thought the US had several people capable of purchasing an area only a third of an Australian cattle station to corner the future market for solar energy production and build out HVDC delivery lines .. but I forgot it's been all downhill since the space program.

The money is same scale as oil & gas investments so it's not exactly something that isn't being done already - the layout can one big area, many smaller areas, the panels can be raised in the air to allow for crops | animals underneath, etc.

Roadsides would be good, poor quality agricultural land, lake beds that are drying up in the midwest and circa Utah, etc.

But yeah, you're right - too hard for the USofA that used to be great. /<sad>

Meanwhile, we're doing that here already - scaling up to power billion tonne per annum mining operations to deliver resource to the rest of the world .. where do you think China gets it's iron, lithium, mineral sands, etc. from?

Isn't that a curious thing? The most successful businessmen on the planet, and they don't jump into large-scale solar like the pundits think they should?

Maybe that says something about the business model, hm? About how easy or how useful or how successful such an attempt would be.

Armchair energy experts can say anything, claim anything. But follow the money, that tells you what can work and what can't.

Not saying it will never work. But for now, largescale solar is fraught with landmines. But I said that already and been ignored because it's easier to make wild claims than address hard realities.

When CO2 isn't being taxed, of course they don't jump directly into solar. It's like when emissions from a coal plant aren't penalized, they don't install scrubbers or filters. Never mind that the Clean Air Act caused reductions in emissions that were worth 40x the cost of the controls.

What you are just talking about there is that negative externalities are not controlled by market forces, but have to be regulated.

> Again with the hand-waving.

You are engaging in a stereotypical crank behavior here. Make a ludicrous claim without evidence, then demand detailed argument when someone calls you on it.

No, it is YOUR responsibility to argue your initial claim. Only when you have given that detailed argument can you require a detailed argument in rebuttal.

I remind you of Hitchen's Razor: "what is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Luckily we'll have more than enough energy long, long before we run out of land or sunlight. We could satisfy a large part of our energy demand just by replacing energy crops by solar panels, with the added benefit of not needing fertilizer and pesticides.

California has a lot of desert. A lot a lot.

The single most fragile ecosystem in the world is a desert. The casual way folks here throw that line out, again and again - shows a profound lack of understanding about what an ecosystem is.

If you are concerned about solar's use of land then you must be positively apoplectic about using corn for ethanol. That uses more than 40% of US corn production, an amount of acreage so vast it's difficult to comprehend.

Using PV with BEVs instead of ethanol in ICEs would be something like 200x more land efficient.

~40 million acres.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

Isn't exponential growth where the growth rate becomes more rapid as the stock of the thing gets larger (and, more precisely, the growth rate is a function of the stock)? How is growth in solar capacity exponential? Wouldn't it actually be logarithmic, all other things equal?

The graph looks rather exponential (and decidedly _not_ logarithmic) to me.[0]

The story is actually "the growth rate becomes more rapid as you accumulate experience manufacturing, which also grows as a function of the stock." AKA Wright's Law.[1]

You may notice this is faster than your definition of exponential growth, because Wright's Law also counts the decommissioned panels too. The industry still got that manufacturing experience, even if the panels don't count as 'stock' today. So technically the growth rate scales with total all-time production, not current stockpile size.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

PV has been growing with a time constant short compared to the lifespan of PV modules, so most of the cumulative production is still in operation today.

This is also why PV recycling hasn't had a chance to really get going -- very limited potential input to the process yet.

Yes that's true. My point is simply that solar (in this early phase) does show exponential growth.

Spangry's "the growth rate becomes more rapid as the stock of the thing gets larger" was confused enough to made exponential growth sound vaguely absurd, but in fact it's perfectly expected (and indeed observed).

Because the more solar gets deployed, the less the costs are. So each increase in growth triggers a reduction in costs which then enables larger growth and so on.

The key point here is that the potential market has been increasing exponentially with reduction in price.