Hacker News

I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.

Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?

Or an esp32 to not run Linux and whatnot off of an sd card. Should be more reliable in the long run

Where is the cabin? Roughly speaking of course

Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

I recommend this video from YouTuber Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

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.

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.

Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.

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.

If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.

- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs

- 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."

I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*

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.

I do not think the two should be lumped together. They do both need storage but solar is more predictable. Winds can be low for extended periods.

> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?

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.

LCOE is the talking point that should shut down all others along with LCOS of LFP batteries

My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.

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?

You can't "sell" the opposite to someone who is expressing a loyalty belief. If their tribe believes in the opposite, then no amount of logic will change their minds - only a change of their or their group's allegiance will change their minds.

> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind

let me guess... they sell oil?

> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?

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.

check volts.wtf and notably these recent podcast episodes:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political

The sun will last forever (at least from our point of view).

>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind

Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)

Put it on your roof. Never pay for power again.

Pretty easy sell for me.

A few different things would help.

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.

Why would you be adamantly against solar? That sounds like someone who is of the opinion that solar is NEVER a good idea. Nonsense.

https://xkcd.com/3226/

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.

if you require a stable energy source, neither wind nor solar (nor both) provide a complete strategy. they can be a part of a composite strategy, though.

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...

it depends. some places it makes sense, some places it doesn't.

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)

Most likely their opposition to renewables is ideological and can't be cured by reason.

You need to include batteries in the equation: solar, wind, water and batteries.

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.

In Australia conservatives with solar on their own roof continue to complain about renewables generally. It's just a weird cultural thing for some people.

Imagine being opposed to solar and wind....

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 :/

Why doing so? When there are so many people irrationally against something, there's always some upside in being closer to truth than the crowd. It's arbitrage.

I'm going to guess they are against it because it's "woke".

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?

I find no arguments against solar. I can put it everywhere and has no moving parts. Once storing is solved, perfect.

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.

This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.

The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.

That is true, but a lot of that, if replaced by electricity, would use considerably less energy overall, so it's not a 1:1 comparison.

Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.

Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/

Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.

no. if you work in the industry you'll know power/electricity are used interchangeably, and energy is treated as the superset. in the physics sense, you're right.

And roughly 2/3rds of that is lost as waste heat, so really only another 25% is actually useful.

Your existing demand is not flat. Not flat over a single day, nor a single week nor a single year.

So you already have some spare capacity on the system.

If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.

Trivially yes, for any locations with summer energy use peaks. The solar output will be the greatest when the demand for cooling is at its greatest.

Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.

Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.

You add 100x1day worth of battery capacity. Which is fairly economical even today (though not economical enough to actually shut down coal). Wouldn't work everywhere (winter in New England needs more than 1 day of backup) but works in some places.

Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro). They are adding batteries rapidly [2] (with a goal of 52GW by 2045; they are 33% of the way there). They still have ~32GW of fossil gas generation capacity, but it is rarely used constantly at full capacity. They have plans for another ~21GW of solar PV on land that can no longer be farmed due to water shortages [3] [4] (enabling families to keep their land with long term lease payments).

Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].

Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[3] 21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026

[4] https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/

[5] Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025

[6] Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615756 - April 2026 (149 comments)

[7] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/australias-first...

[8] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineerin...

(think in systems)

Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.

in large parts of the west! still good news

And gas is not going down either.

Coal is much cheaper than gas.

> there's not enough money to be made via speculation

I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.

But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.

why is it? of course now this is true. But people investing money in the future of AI, a future where AI can produce an enormous amount of goods.

AI is enough of an issue. As fast as we are adding renewable capacity, demand is also growing extremely fast. We're chasing a rapidly moving target. And we're stuck in an adverse political climate for the time being as well.

Nailed it. Solar, wind, and batteries are going to be the predominant form of generation in a decade, but there is no speculative benefit, so it’ll happen silently.

You're correct that this ought to say "electricity" and not "power".

But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).

Most of it can be electrified. NYC has banned gas hookups in new residential buildings (I live in one and it's great). Industrial electrification will never be 100% but I've seen estimates as high as 90%. It will take time and money but it will happen.

Good China numbers, but I’d still keep two things in mind.

China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.

The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.

For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.

Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.

And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.

Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend so that even politicians won't be able to reverse it.

The USA get's it. Trump doesn't. Texas is a the leader in wind and solar in the US.

Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT)

* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2021-06-03

* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2026-06-03

Also, the Californian grid (CAISO) shows where everyone is headed with a huge deployment of batteries:

* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2021-06-03

* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-06-03

Spoken with such authority!

Indeed. Steel mills, aluminum smelters and glass factories really adore the intermittent nature of renewables.

Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.

Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.

Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.

It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!

Believe it or not, a large solar field (or several!) can readily densify its energy into a nice small power transmission line.

Surely households using more wind and solar frees up capacity for 'dense energy' though?

You turn the machines on when electricity is cheap, and turn em off when it's not?

Folks operating businesses that depend on oil prices would know these tricks?

when energy is abundant, you use it to hoist a large rock very high up above your head

when energy is scarce, you drop the rock on your head

pretty well? and it can only get better if we continue rolling out renewables?