The beauty of solar though is its pretty deployable to where the demand is, especially rooftop solar with residential batteries.

Okay, waiting for economics to take over then. If the markets really do work the way economists imagine then solar will become the only viable investment and power dynamics won't matter in the end.

my solar panels don't produce shit because my city never sees the sun.

Look at flowers and talk to people until it's sunny?

Me shouting the answer, but you can't hear it over the bombs exploding across the Straight of Hormuz

You can use batterys

You can generate hydrogen from electrolysis.

Electrolysis efficiency is about 70% and you can store the hydrogen in pressurized underground caverns for a year or longer using another 0.12 kWh per kWh of hydrogen stored, which makes a total efficiency of around 0.6 kWh of hydrogen generation and storage for every kWh of electricity that you put in. (Source)

So if your electricity costs 6 ct/kWh (current LCOE of solar in many places), then hydrogen is gonna cost 10 ct/kWh to generate and store with current technology.

Currently, natural gas is around 5 ct/kWh, so solar would have to become a little bit cheaper to make it economically competitive.

Edit: to clarify, the 5 ct/kWh for natural gas is the gas alone; electricity from natural gas is more expensive than that (around 12 ct/kWh) and more expensive than solar.

Get one used... The batteries are good enough now that even used, they are a good investment

Cars in general are the problem and even if they all went electric they'd be bad. (But cities would be much quieter and they are hella fun to drive.)

If you're able to use a bicycle for some of your trips instead of a car, that's a good change. (And if you're not then you might not even be able to use an EV car if you could afford it. It takes way longer to charge a battery than to fill a gas tank.)

We got ours for 30k with 200 miles on it, retails 45k.

Dealerships hate buying these cars used because they think there isn't a market for used ev's, in part because they're so expensive, anyone who wants an ev can afford to buy one new, they think the second hand market isn't there, go in and offer to buy a used one and see what your dealer says, I bet you can get one for half that.

Also there's some electric only second hand dealerships starting to pop up. Maybe one in your area?

Ikr? I could have had $10k BYD Dolphin, but we haaaad to do the tariff wars.

I will offhandedly mention that ebikes are getting pretty good/cheap nowadays, but that's obviously not going to work for everyone.

I don't know anything about the situation in the US, but you get a great second hand EV for around 12.000€ here in Germany. Combustion is cheaper to buy but gets more expensive over time. It has over 250 moving parts, EVs have like 7.

I missed it when it made the rounds a few weeks back. Thanks for sharing again!

When is it ever a bad time?

Agreed. A more telling graph would incorporate socialized losses, including subsidies, life-and-limb for related industries, quality of life, and life expectancy. I sincerely doubt these costs for the construction, manufacture, and installation of solar panels comes anywhere close to that of petroleum products.

How do the solar panels generate constant fees?

You see, people need to pay for electricity. Generally speaking, they don't get it for free. Thus the owner of the solar panels makes money.

Plus it's pretty easy to simply shift the time of use to when there's the most clean capacity online (and this is easily encouraged with variable electricity rates)

This is dead wrong (edit: kind of; see below). The dollars per million BTU for natural gas this February was $3.62, or 32% of the figure cited in the infographic. You're thinking of oil.

Solar is clearly more sustainable, economical, independent, and most importantly livable than LNG, but I still need to call out flawed assumptions on my side where I see them.

Edit: I actually have no idea how this infographic reached its $11 assumption. Wholesale prices for natural gas were $4.88 per MMBtu in 2024. Emphasis on "wholesale", but since this infographic doesn't deign to cite any sources other than "Ember" (this Ember?), I have no idea what figure it means.

Edit 2: After doing way too much digging into how global LNG prices are measured because this infographic barely even leaves breadcrumbs, they might've been using a metric like the JKMc1 ("LNG Japan/Korea Marker PLATTS Future") (edit 3: or the TFAc1). The prices of natural gas (transported via pipeline) and LNG (transported via ship) are going to be quite different, and there's no consistent "global average price" for LNG. The best you can really do is use some sort of proxy, for which it appears the JKMc1 is a reasonable one for reasons I don't fully understand yet. That was approximately $11 in 2024 (it was actually seemingly higher, but close enough; probably close but separate figures) and was $10.73 this February. It was $15.92 March 1, showing at least in East Asia that LNG is about 50% more expensive than last month. I don't know how well that applies to Lemmy's predominantly American and European userbase, however (well, I know the US now supplies about 60% of Europe's LNG and that American natural gas is currently cheaper).

God, it's so frustrating that this infographic barely cites anything. Anyway, to the person I responded to: you were at least somewhat right; the closing of the Strait seems to have clearly impacted East Asia... somehow. Iran and Qatar are the 3rd and 6th largest natural gas producers, respectively (no clue about LNG shipments), but I feel like I'll end up with a doctoral thesis on the geopolitics of LNG prices by 2030 from knowing basically nothing if I don't stop here. What all this does tell me is that an estimate of "global average price for LNG" means very little when prices per MMBtu (liquified or otherwise) seem to vary so heavily by region.

Thanks a lot, captain obvious. We did the calculations, thanks for repeating fossil industry propaganda.

That's like saying, you cannot actually go to school, do homework and pass tests if you only reach a score of 99/100 points.

Yeah I thought they grow on trees, like oil tankers

pretty much anything is far better than setting something on fire exactly one time

We'd have a lot more for material refining and production processing if we weren't lighting it all up to generate our next iteration of crypto coins and AI slop videos.

Maybe we just need a law that prohibits use of petrochemicals except in the procurement of new green capital.

It's important for full conversion of the grid, but for just cost of energy, it isn't needed. While 100% of the generated energy is used during the day there's nothing left to store. I think a lot of places are still in this situation. But yeah, the more solar you build the more important that cost becomes.

The latter will still benefit from cutting down use a lot.

Also, that's a year for the solar panels to get 1.5 TWh but the tanker probably makes that in a month.

Solar panels last decades. If you told me I could fuel my car for the next twenty years by paying one year's worth of fuel up front, I would be that 'Take My Money' meme.

Also, they now make plug-in solar panels that plug into a standard wall socket. So you actually can install them on a whim.

You cannot manifest LNG out of thin air either.

Maintaining a solar panel is even more trivial than refueling.

EDIT: not to mention that maintaining that "existing infrastructure" goes beyond just refueling of course.

If it is true, then the implied cost would at least stand in for the 'manifest out of thin air', the cost is for making the panels exist.

Similarly, the LNG price is only about acquiring the fuel, not about the logistics of moving it around and managing it.

Though admittedly, the comparison is flawed in other ways..

Youre not saying untrue things, but you should see technology connections rant on this and he counters everything you just said hehe.

The word renewable comes from being able to use something more than once.
Oil being burned can only be used once, thats it. Do you need resources to make renewable energy sources? Why yes, you do. And you also need to ship it etc. But it comes from the fact it can be used multiple times.

If i need , for example, 20l of oil to burn a flame for a year i can do that and i can heat myself for a year. Awesome!
But after that year i cant reuse anything, its all burned up.

Now if i use that 20l of oil to make myself something that can heat myself for multiple years without additional resource consuming ( bad example, i know, but lets go with it ), you are always better off with this.

Thats what the discussion is about. Not that you wont need a non-reusable resource, but that using it should result in something reusable that outlives the other resource and keeps going for longer

You'd rather spend $1.5T, each year, for no added benefit, just because someone else invested in unnecessary infrastructure? And call everyone else stupid?

it's not actually a lot of areas. this is the psychological effect of big numbers. you hear "one million acres" and think it's a big number, like when government spends "one billion dollars on school programmes", and it sounds like a lot, and your brain goes like "oh wow, i could never afford a billion dollars", but actually, if you divide that by 300 million people (population of the US), it's $3 per person ...

same as with land. it's like 20 m² per person on solar panels, probably less than some people's garage.

Land? Or residential and business rooftops, parking structures, roadways, etc... lots of solar access points being wasted. Added benefits in less transmission waste and decentralized, more secure production.

Well then it's a good thing that there's a lot more than 2000 acres currently being used to grow varieties of corn that aren't even intended for human consumption but will just be turned into ethanol

And? The land doesnt become a useless wasteland. Shading the land actually promotes more plant growth with less water useage.

Not a major problem, and a reversible one at that, unlike fossil emissions.

If only there were other methods for generating and storing electricity! Imagine if we could, say, use water to turn turbines, or the wind to spin generators, and then we could store that in grid level batteries.

Batteries exist you donkey

If only there was some way to store excess power generated during the day for use at night... Oh well, guess we'll just keep burning oil and destroying the climate.

The first 100M you buy the panels. The second 100M you buy the batteries for the panels.

Battery storage is only for real people.