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> we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now

I doubt that. Currently the cells itself makes only <50% (maybe <30% meanwhile) of a PV module. So the limit to the bottom is by the glass and frame and cable, not by the cells.

But $/watts can significantly go down with more efficiency.

> we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now

I get the impression they're already really damn cheap, to the point that the issues are more so with grid interconnections, land use, and storage

The amount of space needed is just gargantuan. Hydro only works because you can declare that an entire valley is now energy storage, in one fell swoop. As soon as you have to construct each unit of storage instead of letting nature do it for you, it becomes completely impractical. Yes you can store energy in a tower of concrete blocks... if you can make enough concrete blocks to fill a lake.

AFAIK problem with all physical energy storage solutions is just one of cost.

Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap that these type of physical storage systems just won't be able to keep up in terms of cost.

Most pumped hydro projects are now put on hold as batteries have been coming down.

Thing is that you need incredible large masses in incredible heights.

Example: Lifting a 10-metric-ton stone by 36 meters stores just about 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. This is roughly equivalent to the capacity of a small power station used for a camping trip.

If you’ve got very large containers of sand you can just store energy as heat instead, especially if you’re planning to use the energy for heating eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

It looks like Energy Vault, the people with the tower crane and big stack of concrete blocks scheme, gave up on that. Energy Vault is now selling large battery systems that actually work.

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

> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler

The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.

Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.

Good news: batteries on are a similar exponential curve. Just a decade or so behind.

Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.

In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.

Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.

The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.

Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.

Won't be long, battery installation is bigger by GW than wing or gas:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205

But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.

This is solvable, but it will require international cooperation on a scale that is unlikely. But you wouldn't need any storage at all, just a large number of long distance HVDC lines to move the energy from wherever the sun is shining to where it isn't.

Batteries already kill peaker plants as a grid-scale battery that lasts 4 hours became cheaper than running natural gas turbine to cover the evening demand peak.

Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times. I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME

We can simulate storage with overcapacity and broader geographical distribution networks, even if storage doesn’t become as cheap.

Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.

Electricity is cheaper at night but only 20% of my consumption is at night, so I wouldn't mind if the situation was reversed.

I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.

Its also tricky to defend in war prone locations.

I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.

> More stoked for when the same is said for storage

Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.

The cheaper solar gets the more of a gold rush there has been to develop projects/technologies that take advantage.

It's encouraging- when one part improves usually the others follow.

Most of our chemistries are targeting things like cars and consumer electronics.

Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...

- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.

- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...

- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.

https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...

Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).

(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198882

The ironical thing is nothing screams independent, rugged like having your own large single family home with your own power source which is even powering your EV. The US suburbia will become net positive if more people figure out wasting roof space does not make sense

Why are we waiting on political movements to latch on to a revolutionary technology? If they are against you saving money vote them out, regardless of party, lol

You underestimate how much money oil groups are pouring in lobbying. Energy could fall from the sky, it wouldn't change their mind... oh wait

The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.

It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:

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

The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.

So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).

While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.

https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...

The right wing prepers and homesteading communities are already fully on board with it, I think it won't be too long until the rest of the right jumps on board.

I don't see this happening for a very long time. Mines and oil and gas wells are huge wealth concentrators.

Oil wells decrease in production over time. It's called the decline rate. For wells in the Permian basin, the average decline rate is about 15%. So a 1000 barrel per day ("bpd") well produces ~850bpd in year 2, ~700bpd in year 3 and ~550bpd in year 4. That means you need to be constantly drilling wells. That's more wealth concentration opportunity.

1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.

Additionally, the fight for control over resources induces demand for weapons. Solar doesn't do that. This is summed up as No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].

Efficiency isn't the goal. Wealth extraction is.

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

We're barreling toward a point where above a certain wealth level and below a certain population density individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries you get in the mail from Temu/Amazon/Alibaba and connect it all together with stuff you can buy from a Home Improvement store. All done unilaterally. Very hard to sink the claws of regulation into that except after the fact (unpopular). That is a future that too many people would be happy to sacrifice a lot of pollution to prevent.

So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.

Nope. Big oil has spent big money on propaganda for a VERY long time. Something that almost all right wing pundits and podcasters are funded by.

For the right to actually embrace solar, you need either big money in solar to start it's own propaganda campaigns or you need big oil to collapse to the point where they can't afford paying propagandists. Right now, they are making record profits so don't count on that anytime soon.

freedom energy

Already happened, more or less - c.f. Texas

https://texas2036.org/news-analysis/growth-of-utility-scale-...

tl;dr: https://mlu3fafnp1cd.i.optimole.com/w:778/h:495/q:mauto/f:be...

Of the top 10 states in solar generation in July 2026, 7/10 of them voted for Trump in 2024 [1].

The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].

[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...

[2] https://tedmag.com/report-u-s-added-43-gw-of-new-solar-capac...

Only Fox News boomers are against solar power. The rest of the right wing just doesn't want government slush fund handouts to vaporware companies like the Obama administration. If it's cheaper, great. Don't drag CO2 into the argument, just win on price and the right wing will happily adopt it.

I don't think many people on the right have ever been against solar power. It's rather being pro all power and not wanting to remove a source to replace it. The demands to remove power sources come from the left. Build as much solar as you want, but don't shut down the nuclear plants.

Buy some solar panels yourself and use them to generate electricity in your own home? Write to your local legislators expressing support for utility scale solar panel arrays?

I'm sure there are lots of ways. For example you could give people money to buy panels via https://ecoligo.com or similar services.

I understand the sentiment but I also think the modern electrical grid is one of the most impressive and valuable things man has created and I'd hate to see us give up on it.

Surely economic forces will overcome political ones eventually, right?

Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.

After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?

Do you remember the microwave antenna power stations that power from solar satellites? The Moore-like drop of solar prices killed solar satellites, solar greenhouses with turbine chimneys, TW superconductor submarine cables circling the world etc.

Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.

[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.

Solar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.

Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.

Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...

Well, it is where all energy on Earth originated/originates from :)

Another huge reason, I bet is that it's possible for me to have my own solar system, but not really possible to have my own little reactor.

Solar is fusion. It is optically coupled to a free resource that was on the map from the beginning of the first turn.

It needs mines, but those are easily forgotten about once the blood money is washed through a few hands.

Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.

I don't know anything about the polish electricity system but if supply or demand isn't very elastic then excess of either can lead to pretty huge price fluctuations and knock on effects thereafter.

Did they add a solar tax?

bro the sun hardly rises above the horizon for 4 months of the year when power is needed the most.

Rooftop solar and grid scale solar farms are two completely different things. Rooftop solar requires a custom install for every home. Solar farms can leverage economies of scale to drive costs lower and lower.

If you have to hire Some Guy to do anything to your entire roof, it'll cost you $30k. The panels are basically free these days, the labor required to install them is not.

$30k for what? Your house? Prices vary massively depending on needs, and whether or not you want to reduce grid usage, time shift grid usage, or replace it entirely and go off-grid.

This article isn't about personal solar installations, in any event.

Come to Europe. Our discount stores will sell you a kit for €200-€300. Not 20k-30k, 200-300.

That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/

Solar panels cost less than $1/Watt. Then you need some brackets to hold them, some wiring, and likely an MPPT controller. The rest of that price is red tape specific to your locality.

They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.

Vast majority of costs is in the installation and regulation, Australia home installation costs are a fraction of the cost of the USA and in Europe with plug in solar its a few hundred Euros for a couple panels and small inverter for a small setup

Cost per kW/mW is much lower at grid scale than home scale. For a home installation you are also paying for the roof mounting, running cabling through your house, inverter(s), and a transfer switch at minimum.

The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.

They're talking about grid scale solar, not home installations.

Home solar makes sense for the same type of homes that need to drill their own well. For everyone else, grid solar makes most economic sense.

So - short answer, it costs more and it doesn't happen that often. So contractors don't sell/install it.

Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.

The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).

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Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).

So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.

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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.

You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).

Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.

You can, especially when you also have an energy storage rack. The inverter has to support going into "island mode".

Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.

The risk to line workers is overstated, they ground the lines before working on them. The reason solar doesn't work without the grid is because most solar installs don't [0] have batteries. And you can't practically power your house directly off panels if you don't have a battery to act as a buffer.

[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.

you can. there are auto-switches, these are used by diesel generators. The better question, is what happens when the power goes out at night.

I think some inverters have a special island mode for off-grid operation, but it's not standard.

It really comes down to overcoming the Shockley-Queisser limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...

You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.

The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.

Every power is nuclear, with a few extra steps. Oil/coal is also nuclear, with a few extra steps.

If it displaces fossil generation, it's still a big win.

“Getting solved” isn’t solved though. Abandoning nuclear for an inadequate replacement led to massive global expansion of natural gas and coal generation from the 80s onward. While solar and wind exploded in deployments, it didn’t keep up and shuttering nuclear is likely the largest mistake societies made as far as global warming goes. It was the only non-austerity option with the capacity capability.

It's just clickbait headline speak. Predates LLMs by a little bit. I think it's meant to make it sound like you're being let in on a secret or sometime to cast whatever is being reported on in a negative light by implying it's sneaky somehow.

Then theres something wrong with your nose.

From what I've heard from people who've done deep dives, most solar installers in the US are essentially financing scams. The component costs have come way down, it's still essentially screwing things into the roof + a few hours from an electrician.

The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.

This is a good question - there are fairly high imposed tariffs on solar in the US[0] but I think the labor is the big part. Over here in the UK, solar installation would cost about $12k dollars, so quite a bit cheaper, but still not below $10k.

One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.

This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...

The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)

I suspect a huge chunk of that is labor costs rather than materials.

For the same reason you don't have a small coal power plant in your backyard - scale matters.

Many private utilities in the US have fought against residential solar, and are seemingly motivated to act against it as something against their long term interests. In California the amount of Public Utilities Commisssion retrograde policy is ridiculous.

Don't confuse grid solar with on-prem

On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.

On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.

For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.

I diy installed a 13kw ground mount with a 32kwh battery for $18,700 before the tax rebate last december. 6 year payback at my current rate of $0.12 kwh after the rebate. Its a complete no brainer at this point.

If you want to look at a place that is comparable to (parts of) the US that manages to do things about 3-4x cheaper, look at Australia. They seem to have stumbled on something that works ridiculously well. You can get a quote and stuff installed in something like a few weeks at most. It's done right and efficiently without a lot of bullshit.

Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.

If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).

There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.

Self-installable plug-in solar is coming: https://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels...

From what I understand, the going price is AU$5K in Australia. (USD3500). A small portion of that is scale since solar roof is far more common in Australia, but most of it is "doing something incorrectly", as you suspect.

Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt. The cheapest residential solar options are community solar if your state and utility supports it, or a ground mount system.

The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/

(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)

Distributed solar is cute and it sometimes benefits some people but it is pointless for national policy to pursue it. As you pointed out, the cost structure of small distributed solar is dominated by office overhead, sales, management, insurance, litigation, etc etc.

Isn't targeting their nuclear plants the first thing that Russia did when they invaded Ukraine? And there are all of these refineries and pipelines being bombed around Iran. And sometimes an oil tanker or several gets stolen...

Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in. Something about too much dependency on a thing attracts bad behavior to that thing.

By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.

" but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear"

Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.

As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.

I am not sure if I understand your comment lol

I could also say: Solar is the best energy source (if you put night aside of course).

I mean obviously the main drawback of nuclear fission is the waste and the potential impact of radioactivity.

Fission is unmatched in its ability to abandon projects after spending tens of billions of dollars. I don't see how any rational person can look at the history of nuclear and say "damn, this thing can drop electrons on short notice." That's just a ridiculous take.

Sadly nuclear also stays unmatched in cost. It was already way too expensive, and now it has even worse economics on modern grids full of cheap variable sources. It is terribly uncompetitive and that’s why you see roughly none getting built anymore