A lot of stuff is shitty but the rise of solar to be the cheapest, most efficient energy source kinda rules

[light_bulbs@mastodon.green]

@cwebber It’s amazing what solar does for regions with flaky or non-existent electric grids.

[bwaz@mastodon.online]

@cwebber
And China is the provider to now profit from developing cheap solar because it didn't have a senile incompetent President who backed only oil and coal.

[cwebber@social.coop]

There is still hope in this dying world

[kernelvoid@mastodon.social]

@cwebber it's begs the question:
Could there be other sources of energy we don't know of?!

[robertobottoni@troet.cafe]

@cwebber @mastodonmigration As the german neoliberals (used to) say: „Der Markt regelt.“. That’s why they are fighting like crazy and their party vanishes into meaninglessness here in Germany.

[stephaniemoore@mastodon.online]

@cwebber I really wish the state of New Mexico would lean into this and wind energy more heavily in our state. To convert just our home to solar would cost $25K. I feel like we could imagine a different future.

[skellysoft@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Waiter! Waiter! Yes, more reasons to be hopeful please!!

[ownohmanny@mastodon.ie]

@cwebber there is and I await Big Oil not being able to find any one individual enemy to fight for that last kWh.

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@kernelvoid @cwebber

There are ones we could use for small projects, but not at scale really. Solar scales better than most other things we've found. From here the big win is better battery technology to store the excess solar power we CAN produce currently.

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@juliehuz @cwebber

Inadvertently at best. Sadly we could've started this journey in the 70s and Carter tried but then Reagan happened and for much the same reasons. The oil industry has been fucking us over for decades.

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@juliehuz @cwebber

Same with Gore-Bush in 2000

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@cwebber It totally rules.

[jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange]

Not downplaying just how awful those administrations fucked us over, but modern solar and batteries are generations of tech better than what we had back then. We didn't hit the "cheaper than gas" point until just the last few years.
@darwinwoodka @juliehuz @cwebber

[furrybeta@shark.community]

@cwebber The irony of our “drill baby drill” prez doing more to drive renewables than just about anything else recently

[kernelvoid@mastodon.social]

@darwinwoodka @cwebber true however, my intention was small scale i.e home to village level roughly 30 homes.
Can anything other than biowaste, solar and hydro electricity be used?!

[mjj@mstdn.dk]

@cwebber There is political push in Denmark to make it mandatory to install solar panels on larger buildings of state and local government.

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@cwebber and here in za people are installing rooftop solar faster than our national power supplier is losing generation capacity. it's great

[jt_rebelo@ciberlandia.pt]

@raulinbonn they'd need (concentrated) solar (thermal) power stations (CSP) with thermal storage, and those occupy large areas and might not even produce enough energy for the AI datacentres (and they take longer to build than datacentres). We don't need more AI datacentres, even AI companies are reaching that conclusion.
@cwebber

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@cwebber Wish we were allowed to out here..

[http_error_418@hachyderm.io]

@cwebber I specifically remember reading articles in my childhood in a pop science mag bemoaning the way that solar panels were expensive and not very efficient and expressing longing for the imagined future where they were cheap and worked well.

Here you go, Focus columnist, this is the future you were dreaming of ️🥲