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 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.
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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 balcony solar has worked really well for us this year in the UK, it more than offset the additional cost/usage of our aircon. It doesn’t make sense for us to be on an existing tariff where we get cheap solar power from the grid.
I did buy into a wind farm first, before I got balcony solar, but that fell apart. I can’t do much, but balcony solar is one of the few things that I can do. Great money saver!
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Time for 2026 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread, now with storage. If you like these, you might like edition 2 of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website til end-November 2026.
It's the book I should have read before trying to get a job in renewable energy. Reviewers say it is “to the point, important, and taught me a lot” and “surprisingly entertaining, don’t be put off by the title”.
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0437#t=aboutBook
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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 .
@Kerplunk
or a backdoor
@solar_chase
