People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
Transmission costs.
Similar to the UK - See item 18. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/141240/html...
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
It's kinda an apples/oranges comparison
Why do you say this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
What do you think this means? It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Quoting LCOE and ignoring system costs disqualifies you for any discussion on this topic, sorry.
I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.
Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.
The need for peaker plants to offset the need for batteries is greatly exaggerated. The batteries are mostly required for grid frequency stabilization due to renewal intermittence (clouds passing through, wind slowing down), not so much for overnight storage in most locations.
Of course this varies drastically from place to place, Hawaii for example can't really import energy production from other places.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
For instance, most places will have peak energy usage in the evening, when everyone gets home from work, starts the laundry, turns up the thermostat and makes dinner and such, kind of all at the same time
If you can store the solar energy at noon and use it at 6pm when everyone has come home from work and started making dinner, then you can prevent a demand peak from ramping up fossil fuel plant
So you aren't necessarily just aiming to store the overproduction, you're using the stored solar when it's more useful
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
Some people just want the world to burn…
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...
Also see the amount of land used for beef and dairy. Before industrial farming, Britain was a rainforest.
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.
Why not just gas?
Because it’s too expensive.
Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_
And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5
The inverters can instead be programmed to form the grid frequency - Australia installed its big battery literally as a much faster way to stabilize grid instability events than spinning up gas peaker plants.
Grids with large amounts of renewables like California are moving toward VPPs (Virtual Power Plants) which are distributed collections of renewables and batteries which are programmed to work in unison to help form the grid, as an easier way to regulate the grid frequency than coordinating each tiny plant separately.
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap - Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly - but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned - But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
Maybe I’m too optimistic :)
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span
2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics
3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users
4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)
So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.
can you be more specific and give 10 examples of german solar plants that produce ~0W electricity in a year?
they might be a lot more productive than you think
They paid for that by selling most of their industry to China because energy costs became unbearable.
Was this the right tradeoff?
But we live in an imperfect world.
I'm curious how true this is anymore. It sure feels like as the globe heats up we're getting windier and windier.
See https://model.energy/ for a web site that will solve this optimization problem for you in various places.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
nuclear energy has a different set of problems (including social / political ones). here's that industry's take on the economics of wind energy: https://www.ans.org/news/article-638/the-economics-of-wind-p...
Wind power had dropped in price about 70% since then. Notably going from being more expensive than fossil fuels to substantially cheaper.
What power source isn't?
let me guess... they sell oil?
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
Its all electrons how did we get here jesus.
Did you know Texas produces more solar energy than California? https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05032026/inside-clean-ene...
Quote from your own article:
> And if we look at the sum of utility-scale and small-scale solar, California remains ahead.
The more subtle misdirection is obvious from the first sentence:
> Texas, which already leads the country in electricity generation from natural gas, coal and wind, has passed California to become the leader in utility-scale solar.
So they lead on gas, coal, wind and (utility) solar in absolute terms. Which points to them being big and/or power hungry rather than particularly green.
Important to call this out as fans of hands off government highlight Texas as their champion for renewables rollout when they are solidly mid-ranking by percentage. And they had government support for wind under previous Republican governers and all but one federal governments.
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity
https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
I strongly believe people and organizations would accommodate, just like during winter times in the north of Sweden one wears a different coat than in the south. But with the current system one isn’t incentivized to adapt power consumption to cost and hence more & more costs are made to build power lines from the north to feed the south of Sweden. And the same for standby fossil fuel plants.
Also prepaid electricity bills with automatic cutoff when exceeding, remaining 1 Ampere. Similar to the days when homes/tents would be heated by burning wood, during summertime one needs to collect enough firewood for the whole winter. Different times but in concept nothing new.
A bakery for example will produce bread at a loss if they have a contract and the value of the contract is higher than a temporary increase in electricity. If you allow market prices to rise unlimited, the price will increase to the point where breaking a contract is cheaper than not producing. Some companies in the last crisis did invoke force majeure when prices got too high, which as a society is a very poor way to incentivize behavior.
The result is that voters will elect a government that solves the problem, rather than change behavior. We have also seen that in eu for the last few elections. The Swedish elections in particular has been dominated around the topic of energy.
Hydro energy would help to keep the market stable in Sweden if the value of the natural resource would also stay in Sweden. Right now that resource is being primarily sold off by private actors through exports to countries like Germany and Denmark, thus doing little to keep the market stable for Swedish consumers. The government could nationalize that resource, deeming it as a natural resource owned by the Swedish citizens and thus any revenue gained from selling electricity would automatically go to Swedish citizens to pay their energy bills.
> Market prices in the electricity grid do not work to incentivized lower consumption, and the latest few energy crisis in EU has demonstrated that clearly.
The prices haven’t changed much, less than factor 2. Far too little to see any change in consumption indeed. If bread is too expensive to produce during some periods switch to Knäckebröd or Müsli products that, now I think of it, are Swedish probably for the reason that they can be stored for prolonged periods and replace bread when that is unavailable in harsh wintertimes.
> right now Hydro energy is being primarily sold off by private actors
It happens all over the world, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons is an alternative that historically has been successful.
If we imagine a society where production become based on the availability of energy through optimal weather, we would have to ask what the cost of that adaptation is and if alternative solutions, say nuclear energy, would be cheaper. The best adaption can simply be to use the correct tool for the job, a tool which may be more optimal in some climates but less so in others. If there is something humans excel at it is to adapt to nature and produce local solutions to local weather conditions.
https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/przemyslaw-czarnek-tlumaczy-...
1 Solar was pretty good until PIS party lost elections and became Trump bitch, now they toe the coal/oil good solar/wind bad line.
PIS already has one of their men poorly performing function of Poland president. His main election slogan was lowering energy prices, you can guess how that went :-) His latest trick was vetoing super cheap EU military loan because it was conditioned on buying European/Polish equipment meaning none of the money could be funneled to USA.
They mainly argue against it on residential & farm land (Midwest USA) for this reason.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
An other similar available strategy would be to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a massive hydro power dam by turning the Strait of Gibraltar into the world largest power plant. Combined with solar and wind, it could act as the storage for the whole of Europe and Africa, and the energy is similar to solar completely free.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/tarrant-county/the-t...
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
A question might be "why is it woke?"
And if it's because libtards like it, then you can point out that libtards like coffee, beer, sports, etc -- so when will they boycott those?
Plenty of people stick things in their butt and go to the emergency room. So what.
It's absolutely the case and I take no pleasure in bringing the matter up but it's relevant to the discussion.
The Trump admin has been very vocal that it wants to only support fossil fuels and nuclear, and that wind and solar are woke and must be destroyed. I would love to be proven wrong but I don't think thats possible.
There's an insane amount of wealth tied to fossil fuels (from energy giants down to field workers and well-owners). They all have an incredibly strong bias to keep that money train coming, and the demonization of renewables is directly tied to that.
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said.
More so, could you hazard a guess why those friends would be categorically against renewables?
The simplest way to understand people's motivations is to ask them, and not to guess what they're thinking and gripe about those guesses on online forums.
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
The only people using these terms with regards to solar is terminally online people or people who watch 24/7 news.
Texas has more solar capacity than California, does that make Texas woke?
Yes.
> The only people using these terms with regards to solar is terminally online people or people who watch 24/7 news.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending...
This is a real thing. The reason why I mentioned it is the Trump admin actively killed wind projects and is doing everything it can to destroy renewables so it can be replaced by "clean, beautiful coal"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/04/trump-coal-d...
I loathe the word "woke" but it is a catch-all phrase used by most Trump supporters. I've seen many articles about the conflict over renewables where this dynamic is in play.
> Texas has more solar capacity than California, does that make Texas woke?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/opinion/texas-wind-renewa...
I'm happy to discuss this further if you're willing to engage in good faith.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
Do people people really hate sun and clouds and stuff?
Or are they against the physical capture of geographical processes? ...
I've heard "muh birds" a few times. Ironically, it seems only those who eat chicken who seem to be worried about it :/
Pretty easy sell for me.
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
Maybe not even then. Some still refuse to believe the Earth is round. They can die before they admit they were wrong.
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Just be patient.
Yes, down with Big Sun
Compared to what? Are these people in the oil industry, by any chance?
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?