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 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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The war destroyed our home and left my children and me struggling to survive without the basic necessities.
I’m asking for your help. Even a small donation or a share can help us get through another difficult day.
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Donation link in bio -
28. The US and India are locked into having high-price local solar module markets, due to trade wars.
@solar_chase
Not just solar, the US has fucked over heat pump prices too with the trade wars. -
S suneauken@mastodon.world shared this topic
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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 Outstanding info presented, imo the US, driven by petro economics is woefully unprepared to switch to wholesale adoption of elec vehicles, and there’s an internal group of Petro head actors actively fighting it to add to their piles of gold, regardless of the disaster that awaits us or the revolution they trigger.
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@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)
@slothrop in Germany, you can achieve 60-70% of autonomy with a typical PV+battery setup. 100% is not feasible. Balcony Solar, is a toy, and very you to, 10-20% under ideal conditions. Main advantage of the latter is that it's available to people paying rent as well.
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@solar_chase We really need a moderately efficient, environmentally tolerable, tidal/wave solution as the third leg.
@BashStKid large scale geothermal is also a option in a bunch of places that don't happen to have a coast around.
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@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.
^ this. I'd love to find a small quiet wind generator my neighbours would barely notice. Probably vertical axis suitable for turbulent wind in stealth locations.
Grid independence is relatively easy in summer, impossible without wind in winter (I'm in northern england).
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@BashStKid large scale geothermal is also a option in a bunch of places that don't happen to have a coast around.
@hwa @solar_chase Yes, I’ve worked on those in Iceland. Their problem is you need a substantial heat flux to avoid a diminishing return as the country rock around your exchanger boreholes cools from use.
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22. It should be all over for the new internal combustion engine car market. The only reason it doesn’t seem to be is that a lot of people don’t seem to realise how times have changed, and still repeat old talking points.
@solar_chase take up of EV would be higher in the UK if charging was less expensive & easier to access for people who cannot home charge.
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3. Solar is struggling because it’s running into saturation effects in major markets, where there’s already plenty of power in sunny hours, and adding more solar panels generates the most power in the same hours. The power stack in Germany in a sunny week now looks like this.
@solar_chase kennst du den thread, @mkreutzfeldt ?
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33. Pakistan: ~25% of generation comes from solar, mostly small user-owned systems. It has grown due to rising power prices, distrust of utilities, landlords who see the benefits and provide PV to tenants as patronage, and really good how-to Tiktoks in local languages.
This has stabilised and even reduced demand for gas and grid power, which puts new stresses on utilities and the government, which is responsible for capacity payments to China-owned coal plants. I do not know what happens next.
