Time for 2026 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread, now with storage.
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase Thank you. Always very much enjoy reading your annual update.
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10. We oughtta be building more wind, especially in seasonal climates like Europe. Solar will get built anyway, it’s cheap, but wind blows at night and in the winter. We’re going to need something to charge the batteries in winter, especially with rising heatpump use.
@solar_chase Only an iota of humanity Please save my life by opening the link and seeing my story. Help me with one dollar or share
https://chuffed.org/project/149031-give-waleeds-family-a-chance-to-live -
23. Balcony solar: sure, you can put solar on anything. It works at any scale. But the amounts are tiny - this is not really an alternative to building large amounts of rooftop or ground mount solar.
@solar_chase well for the user it matters a lot and often it opens the mental space for more solar later. People tend to experiment with pluginsolar, then realise it works and is fun and than buy larger systems.
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24. “But you can own your own power plant!”.
No normal person wants to own their own power plant. Apart from us weirdoes, most people want to buy affordable, reliable power from the grid and have someone else make the investment and worry about the details.
@solar_chase plus the further one gets from the equator the seasonal swings in solar production become more pronounced.
In places where winter heating is a significant contributor to one's total energy usage without residential wind and/or some kind of seasonal storage for the summer excess (small-scale sand batteries or the like) it is borderline impossible to own a "power plant" that one can trust to be appreciably useful during the winter months.
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24. “But you can own your own power plant!”.
No normal person wants to own their own power plant. Apart from us weirdoes, most people want to buy affordable, reliable power from the grid and have someone else make the investment and worry about the details.
@solar_chase I think distrust of utilities is higher than you make out. And will unfortunately tend to increase as a result of heavier weather.
Case in point: After hurricane helene left her without power or well water for a month, my mother-in-law upgraded the existing solar, installed whole house batteries, and ended up with a zero export system. She may pay more than a grid interconnect fee on her power bill come december, perhaps.
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13. Europeans shouldn't feel guilty about using electricity for airconditioning (or reversible heatpumps), it already mostly comes from the sun, especially if you pre-cool. This is good news for hot countries as well. Heat is deadly.
@solar_chase check out this
@europeanspodcast -
24. “But you can own your own power plant!”.
No normal person wants to own their own power plant. Apart from us weirdoes, most people want to buy affordable, reliable power from the grid and have someone else make the investment and worry about the details.
@solar_chase In Germany at least, I'm told that homeowners are really interested in energy "autonomy".
By which they mostly mean having enough battery capacity to bridge a few hours of grid outage, up to a couple of days at most. The interest is driven by fear of disorder and, perhaps, war - or just generally by a feeling that the state-based order is becoming less reliable.
(This is probably more relevant to a political scientist than to an energy analyst)
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase Thank you for the update, that was all lovely. If only we could get the F**** idiots out of power here in the US, so we could retire fossil fuels faster.
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. etc:
I would add, having highly distributed energy production is a distinct advantage
with regard to resilience against sabotage, attack, natural disasters.If citizen owned there is also great incentive to protect it.
Knocking out thousands of solar farms and battery storage systems would be difficult, possible exception Nuclear high burst EMP .
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase thank you very much for the update!
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20. Long-duration storage deployment by BNEF’s definition was just 2GW / 9.6GWh in 2025, mostly in China. The main technologies getting built so far are compressed air and flow vanadium redox.
The only true decoupling of this type is as you describe, 'a big tank of some storage medium', aka as flow batteries. Like vanadium redox.
But you don't really need storage on the seasonal time scale (which mixing solar and wind can eliminate, at least on mid-latitudes). You need storage over the synoptic time scale, days to weeks. Also over-building capacity helps: I heard from a colleague that his home PV produces in inclement weather 20% of what it does in sunny weather. And PV is getting ridiculously cheap...
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase Thank you for this.
And yay for being a Clean Power analyst! -
Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. etc:
I would add, having highly distributed energy production is a distinct advantage
with regard to resilience against sabotage, attack, natural disasters.If citizen owned there is also great incentive to protect it.
Knocking out thousands of solar farms and battery storage systems would be difficult, possible exception Nuclear high burst EMP .
... or by closing down all Chinese solar inverters from China...
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10. We oughtta be building more wind, especially in seasonal climates like Europe. Solar will get built anyway, it’s cheap, but wind blows at night and in the winter. We’re going to need something to charge the batteries in winter, especially with rising heatpump use.
@solar_chase We really need a moderately efficient, environmentally tolerable, tidal/wave solution as the third leg.
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
This last toot burns especially hard right after EU/USA started buying more gas from Russia again...
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
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38. Many of these turbines will run at lower capacity factors than historical gas turbines, and the best sort of fossil fuel plant is one that runs only occasionally. It is possible to have higher fossil capacity but much lower fuel burn, and indeed this makes a lot of economic sense.
@solar_chase The problem there is that the companies are not interested in occasional, optional use, and will do everything they can to be a permanent baseline with an extortionate take-or-pay contract.
I understand your analysis, but imo the only way to avoid this political trap is to completely close oil and gas out of the domestic market and almost completely out of the industrial market.
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase This was great to skim through! Thank you
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41. Achieving a low-carbon transition, for most countries, will not look like winning a war or marching while waving flags. It is the ability to say "no thank you, we do not want what you are selling" to the petrostates, and walking (or cycling, or taking a bus, or driving an EV) away.
(The End, for now).
@solar_chase great insights and reasoning, a wonderful round-up yet again, look forward to it each year
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11. How mismatched is European seasonal solar supply and electricity demand? Well, here is the situation for my fully electrified house in Switzerland with 13.2kW of solar, a heatpump and an EV. I would have needed about 122kW of PV to be self-sufficient across December.
@solar_chase
In effect this means that places with stable, yearlong solar irradiation are the places with the cheapest electricity. Consequences are huge I would say. -
18. Lithium is going to continue to be the main technology for batteries for the foreseeable future, although China does have some policy support for sodium-ion.
@solar_chase
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