Posted by rbanffy 8 hours ago
“You are being misled about renewable energy technology”
Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
But it clearly wasn’t.
one of the few good things Rick Perry did for TX was upgrade the grid so West Texas wind power can reach the main cities. Once West TX showed renewables could make a profit then there's not much anyone, left or right, could do to stop it. The lobbyists made sure of that.
Southwest Texas, where all the fracking took place, also turns out to be good for solar. It's very flat, sunny, and has pretty stable weather. I guess the grid is beefed up and accessible in that region because of the oil/gas industry, I've seen solar farms out there that are so big it's hard to describe. Imagine seeing a shimmering blue that looks like a lake on the desert horizon but then you get to it and it's just miles of solar panels. Again, the moment solar turned a profit there was no stopping it.
A lot of folks are spreading the message 'it's not right vs left but up vs down when in reality its both.
Besides the whole petro money and lobbyism thing that drove the US politics since Edwin Drake?
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
In practice: https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2026/0116/1553440-mayo-wind...
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.
Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.
And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].
It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.
That's what happens when the "Leader of the Free World" is 79 with dementia with memories of the 1970s oil crisis.
We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
No, I am not condoning anything here, just pointing something out.
I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.
I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone.
Edit for ratelimiting:
> You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
No. I was simply saying the oil is useful in the military-industrial complex, and it does have value. I've said this twice already. I cannot say if this value will be realized, and for the third time, I don't condone it.
You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/05/venezuelan-...
> The gamble is a long game, with no guarantee of success. Returning Venezuela’s crude production to 3m barrels of oil a day would require 16 years of work and investment totalling $185bn (£137bn), according to figures from Rystad Energy, a global consultancy.
> At least $30-35bn of international capital would need to be committed in the next two to three years to make this scenario plausible, Rystad said. “This could only be financed by international oil companies, which will consider investments in Venezuela only if they have full confidence in the stability of the country’s systems and its investment climate for international oil and gas players,” it added.
For planes. For no other major use of hydrocarbons is it the primary concern.
I'm super optimistic about green energy and in favor of expanding it.
But also acutely aware it's barely putting a dent on energy use despite year-on-year record levels of capacity install (>90% of new capacity is green), which far exceeds expert expectations every single year. Non-renewables keep growing, forecasts and ambitions were cut by the Trump admin, and it is expected that the latest economic revolution's (AI) main bottleneck is going to be energy by the end of the year.
We have essentially blown past the paris accord thresholds (we've seen months of +1.5c temperature, which was the limit we envisioned in 2015) and despite renewables far exceeding expectations, they completely fell short of what is necessary pre-2023. Post-2023 you have Trump derailing renewables wherever he can and AI increasing demand even further.
It really looks pretty hopeless and frankly it's sad that there is no real conversation about this, which seems to be an existential question for the generation living in 2100 and beyond.
You're also now getting to the point that adding new capacity is increasing the amount of renewable energy that is being curtailed (i.e. thrown away), meaning while renewables get cheaper over time, the rate of things getting cheaper will slow down as renewables must be increasingly paired with storage investments (which are also getting cheaper but introduce additional cost).
For example, sunny Cyprus curtailed 13%, 29% and 49% (!!) of its solar generation in 2023 to 2025 respectively. Yes last year half of the solar power that was produced, was thrown away, because of a lack of demand-supply balancing. Cyprus is uniquely poorly positioned (high solar potential, small country with a single small timezone, no interconnectors to offload surplus to other countries, no storage facilities etc) but it's still a sign of things to come. Further generation will increasingly need to be paired with significant storage, or it's partially wasted.
That doesn't leave much left when you look at the energy flow once you remove domestic, commercial and transportation usage and replace it with electricity. A tiny amount left for plane s(and reducing per flight as planes get more efficent and battery planes start coming to market), and industrial gas usage.
https://www.energyvanguard.com/attachment/llnl-us-energy-flo...
I commented here in a recent HN energy post about my surrounding jurisdictions and the exploding utility costs per PJM that literally have governments suing each other. Just today one of those local jurisdictions announced a utility bill financial credit incentive for residents to attend a meeting to learn about what some already know intimately. Link is paywalled of course.
https://www.newarkpostonline.com/news/newarkers-can-earn-40-...
We are witnessing the accelerated adoption of local generation and storage driven by the economic costs of energy that has been directly and indirectly subsidized yet consumption is certainly not equal. As more and more move to self generate and store, per the meetings suggestion, the negative feedback loop is already in motion rising costs even more for those dependent on a centralized system.
For those that can see the light and where it is going; invest accordingly.
0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025
China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025
North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...
(no current oil commodity exposure)
Then why has both global [0] and US [1] consumption been rising year-over-year for the last few years and projected to continue to rise [2]?
All those articles you're posting about short term changes in the dynamics of the oil market (except China, which is remains a net energy importer only because of oil, so they have a strong strategic reason to reduce oil depdence, though they still use quite a bit[3]).
Btw I'm not citing these things because I'm a big supporter of hydrocarbons or against green energy (which will continue to grow with or without boosters, since there is a real demand for that energy), but more so a realist pointing out that we are absolutely not making any progress in reducing our global need for hydrocarbons.
0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-countr...
1. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324
2. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#/media/File:Chin...
Not very long ago not only was consumption increasing every year, it was increasing at an increasing rate every year. And that increasing rate was itself increasing not so much time before that. We've reversed the 3rd derivate, and we've reversed the 2nd derivative. If the 2nd derivative is negative for sufficient time, the 1st derivative will itself go negative. Looks like it'll happen this year, but the year's not over yet.
The first derivative is consumption. The 0th derivative is amount of carbon in the air. For that to go down would require a carbon negative economy which I don't have much hope for.
Apart from PRC EV displacing 1mbd in oil. The other unmentioned stat PRC annual solar production, assume 30 year lifespan displaces about annual global oil consumption, i.e. 100mbd per day worth of oil. Their total solar output is 2x, what they produce, i.e. they produce enough solar to replace global oilm lng and a big chunk of coal in 10-15 years at full capacity. Storage hasn't caught up, true oil displacement depends on what storage lag will be, but likely short/medium term, not long term.
As for actual oil use, notice how PRC hammering EVs but still importing high % of oil, that's ongoing strategic reserver SPR and petchem play, i.e. even though they'll use less oil, they plan to store more (to mediate prices), and convert more into petchem products. So future is world where cheap renewables will displace oil from transportation to industr... because lots of energy = more industry = increase demand for fossil inputs. Which could mean less/same/more oil demand, unhelpful, I know.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.
It won't get cheaper than solar though.
It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2025
(think in systems)
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
> Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
We could subsidize electric car purchases and manufacturing, both vehicles and batteries. We could allow excellent, affordable Chinese EVs into the US to force US domestic legacy auto to compete on quality and prices (instead of protecting their profits). We could remove fossil fuel subsidies (~$760B/annually in the US) and direct those resources to speed electrification, low carbon generation, storage, and transmission (as China is doing, and becoming the world's first electrostate). But we don't, and those who are upset about inflation should take it up with those squeezing them for profits. The US could've made better policy, it was a choice to regress towards supporting combustion vehicles to prioritize those profits. Elections have consequences. If one doesn't believe in climate change or using policy to encourage electrification while reducing the immense subsidies provided to fossil fuels, certainly, one might disagree with this. That's a mental model issue, not a data and facts issue.
Hopecore. Onward. The horrors persist, but so do we.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
https://web.archive.org/web/20260225073026/https://www.eia.g...
Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.
Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.
> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.
As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:
https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
*best is funny to define
The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.
I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.
Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.
I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
That isn't a lot. New Mexico alone can fit about 100 Rhode Islands. And NM isn't even the largest thinly-populated sunny state in the union.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Wh...
If you dedicated a single (average sized) county per state to solar you'd ~3-5x the land you need for current consumption.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
He didn't say Elon was the origin.
A clusterfuck of priorities.
We need to pressure politicians to subsidize pump storage powerplants and massive transmission system upgrades (which means being ok with permitting new transmission lines) it's simply impossible to continue increasing the solar on the grid otherwise, we are rapidly approaching instability.
