The Big Problem With Solar Power
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Solar power is one of the most popular sources of renewable energy, due to both its cost-effectiveness and the fact that solar panels emit zero greenhouse gases. But according to new analyses, solar isn’t as cheap as we’ve been led to believe. Let’s take a look at the real cost of solar power and other problems with the technology.
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48 Comments
Greedy capitalists would murder your Nanna for a 1% annual return, but they don't seem all that keen on solar for some reason… 🤔
This video is not true at all. Solar is the cheapest power by far. First, she ignores that fossil fuel is much more subsidized. Secondly, she ignores the external costs of fossil fuels that are not factored in, like pollution, medical bills and preventable deaths. Thirdly, solar has to be calculated with batteries because it makes the system work in the winter, night, and when it rains.
Sabine doesn't know how to do math, and this seems like a typical hit piece by big oil. She is a liar and should take this video down.
If what she said was true, then China, Australia, England, and Uruguay would not be transitioning as fast as possible to solar. Nuclear power costs 5 times as much as solar. The only people who advocate for nuclear power are people who want to control your power.
Sabina you are more than right. But read the comments. You'll see that your words are mostly blown in the wind…once again.
The big problem with solar is you can’t start a war to drive up the price
Well that same argument works for nuclear. Nuclear is cheap if you forget the cost of long term waste storage and the cost of dismantling a power station which we are finding now is far higher than the cost of building and running them. That was the trick the nuclear industry used in the 50's and 60's to sell the story of cheap unlimited energy. The cost of cleaning up is left to the taxpayer.
Another very misleading article. Akin to a sports star being paid to promote a car they've never driven.
Battery costs will plummet.
The solution is to make the sun closer to the earth. It's obvious. Haha. Actually, you just need to collect the solar power in space, where the sun always shines. And then send it back down to the ground in the form of some kind of energy beam. You can send it to a bunch of locations all over the planet. If power goes out somewhere, you beam more power to those places. It's not a bad idea. I worry about microwave energy killing birds that happen to cross its path. But that should be pretty minor, and it might save more animals due to the fact that there are no emissions. Cost of putting them up there might be a barrier, but I think it will reduce over time to make it affordable. Crazy idea?
wind turbines employ bigger maintenance crews, solar power is being misused. you can't make a solar power plant unless it is like the milan super collector that boils water in a capsule of molten salt. the solar cells. are for SRO rooftops, like in CA. the point is if you are in the house the bill is smaller if the house is vacant there is a small surplus. that's solar power, I wonder why they don't do it NM like CA because houses are empty there more.
Sorry, but the statement that public relations is the major reason nuclear power has not been highly successful is not true. These power plants require large, complex, technically difficult projects that are very vulnerable to design & construction error & omissions, problems with financing & evaluating potential markets. Many projects have been started over the last few decades, and a significant number were abandoned — some while they were already under construction.
Every industrialized nation has thousands of parking lots and parking decks that are prime space for solar panels.
Tidal and wave are the best renewable energy sources…
I think solar 'hesitant' aren't. I think they're solar/renewable hostile, but trying to fake a 'balanced opinion'. And i think the reason they are is that renewables require operation and knowledge, rather than guaranteed at-will consumption, and this offends those who feel entitled to the world being without personal inconvenience. For some reason, even others having and making the choice to use the technology offends them. An odd psychological posture.
Wind turbines have their own huge set of problems too, including the one that is never mentioned: their propellers are made of plexiglass that cannot be recycled, which means hundreds of tonnes of non-recycled material have to be buried for every single HUGE wind turbine at the end of its life, that is, every 20-25 years.
The most nightmarish issue, however, is that corrupt governments in several countries have allowed, or continue to allow, wind turbine installations in burned areas after wildfires. Such installations have occurred in Greece, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.
This means that billions of profit is made from wildfires by the "green" companies, ironically after billions of tonnes of CO2 are added each year in the atmosphere (for those who believe that CO2 is the #1 factor of climate change).
Τhis is a blatant case of making profit from wildfires, and thus the direct cause of many wildfires worldwide.
The proof is, that wildfires CAN be 100% prevented, but they are NOT!
The technology for wildfire prevention exists for decades but it has never been put to practice. I'm talking about infrared detection from a satellite and a government organization that would organize spotting and extinguishing them at their birth with just a few drones.
But no, the next sequel of burning down California, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc, is coming in next spring and summer, for their pockets only.
I'm in Canada and I heat my house fully with solar. For heat you do not need expensive Lithium batteries as you can use much more inexpensive thermal storage (I do that both storing in concrete floors and in water). There was no other heating option less expensive than this for me with next closest being natural gas. And this is not a large scale project just a small offgrid house. Nuclear has zero chance to compete on cost even with natural gas.
According to ex-climate alarmist Tom Harris, wind turbines "require a backup fossil fuel plant that continues burning 90% of the time, making the wind turbine largely unnecessary and, in essence, just for show".
"This is a far cry from the environmentally friendly image that is presented to the public."
Maintenance and decommission costs are high for solar as well. Never mentioned by the pro solar folks.
Don't forget that the minerals used to make solar are also limited. I've consulted with AI about it, and it said that if there was a major push for solar – the minerals would maybe last at most another 60 years (unless there is some major innovation to produce or recycle minerals somehow).
EVERY single political decision in Germany of the last twenty years was plain wrong. Now that IS certainly an achievement….
Ps
Have Women Ruined The World? Helen Andrews on The Great Feminization
https://youtu.be/p3UyK_fdqGg?si=imT57Y_UJ1NLSM7h
As ever the picture on the ground is more nuanced. Solar covers a good portion of my bill each in the UK. The battery I recently acquired will pay for itself in 3-4 years. We are increasingly into the second generation of domestic solar ie 400+w panels & 4+KW hybrid inverters, and people are replacing their earlier 200-250w panels & 3.6kW inverters which are turning up on FB for practically nothing enabling others to install. Balcony solar looks set to further increase uptake. It's basically got so cheap that some are even sticking panels on north facing roofs and vertically on fences.
Nuclear is the clear choice until fusion is perfected. That said, we would do well to listen to Sabina’s recommendations. Just say’n
If you're going to cover the fact that solar energy has subsidies, how about sharing the level of subsidies for all of the competing technologies? Fair is fair!
You want to build several nuclear power plants with 20 billion Euros in Germany? Nahh 😂
You are such a nuclear head.
Storage control of nuclear waste in Germany at the moment costs 1 billion Euros per year.
Guess what, there is no energy production without subsidies. Not fossil, not renewable and clearly not nuclear!
And on top of that, they want to put a giant solar powered microwave in space too, like that's a good idea… In a movie maybe.
The problem is, “we’re the government and we’re here to help.”
if its so. heap why dis silverprice 5x in the last 5 years? 😅
Meanwhile solar panels are so cheap they are being used as fencing.
Battery storage has recently become so cheap it is a rounding error for 4-6 hr storage. Batteries now cost under $50/kW and they last decades. Sodium is now entering the market even cheaper. I am a solar installer and energy modeller btw .. the design of the future grid is wind, solar, batteries, hydro, and pumped hydro with gas peakers used as backup. This is by far the cheapest system. Batteries are the key as they provide energy services far beyond simply storage. Batteries even out load .. dramatically reducing capacity charges, plus they stabilize voltage and frequency cheaper than traditional spinning mass. Energy is becoming free mid day in Australia.. and this is possible in California now as well. Completely off grid EV charging is also now becoming a thing .. because it is cheaper. For those who say this cannot be done .. I say get out of my way because we are doing it,.. and no I don’t need subsidies. That said .. why are we subsidizing the use of fossil fuel by allowing the atmosphere to be used as a dump?
Those of us who buy solar, look at the whole cost of ownership and use, including the total energy produced, and how we can use that energy through credits to pay for the power we’ll need to pull from the grid on rainy or winter days. For me, as long as it’s at parity with fossil fuels, it’s a good deal for the planet.
We subsidies fossil fuels to greater degree than we do solar to be fair, but like there are options for storing heat for the winter, if you build a big enough thermal battery, you can store heat for 6 months or more, thats because volume goes up with the cube of the surface area of the container, and you only lose heat from the surface of the container, go big enough and with reasonable insolation yeh 6 months is no problem, so that takes you from the height of summer to the depths of winter. It is however an extra cost but thermal energy storage is the cheapest form of energy storage, and if you don't already have district heating that is actually a problematic expense, but it does pay for it's self in the long term especially as more and more solar gets installed and you have large over capacity during the summer.
With a 10GWh thermal battery for example, like you are not really limited by the thermal battery as to how fast you can charge the thermal battery, you going to hard run into gird limitations before you couldn't reasonable build a thermal battery that couldn't gobble up all of that capacity you could reasonably deliver to it, so it's a really great way to use the over capacity from solar and wind, the only issue is it has centralized and it has to be relatively close to the people who are going to use the hot water, so for the most part you're not going to be able to build it where the generation is, so you still need other types of batteries to take short term peeks.
From the diagrams Sabine herself shown, solar with batterie storage is nearly equal cheap like gas and better then other traditional energy like oil or nuclear – even in america and germany. And that is what we allready have. But in future the prices for solar energy (including storage) per hour will even go more down. But her conclusion is – from that money we supported solar, we should had built more nuclear power plants – a realy not competeable technology as her own diagrams have also shown. My bullshit-o-meter is on 10 about this video.
Large solar farms are terrible for the flora and fauna that live in the fields below them. Solar farms are deadly and have a long term bad effect on the local environment.
Nuclear is WAAAAY better, and could be comparable in cost long-term with solar if the crazies didn’t demand special draconian rules that are not applied to other forms of energy.
What…a German physicist who is slow on the uptake reaching an understanding that electric energy from solar is not as cheap as the far left Climate Marxists were saying? Shocking 😳 ⚡️⚡️🤣
You left out the price of dying from heat
Gas prices spike occasionally. Solar doesn't. That's the solar advantage.
What is misleading is the fact that you didn't look at how heavily subsidized other forms of energy is. Fossil fuels are subsidized 10x as much as solar. I say remove subsidies from all energy, but get ready for $15/gal gas prices!
"Why don't we have a sustainable planet? Is it because renewable energy science is so difficult to work out?" "No. It's just money." If we had all the money we needed to do anything, we already have all the technology to be completely sustainable. We just don't care because we don't want to pay for it. We don't need fusion or extremely inefficient systems. We just need to be willing to pay for sustainability, or the culture shift to be okay with nuclear.
Winter is the problem for solar, not the night.
Also your argument that solar advocates ignore batteries is just plain false. You're just lying for clicks at this point. Nuclear plants can't be built almost anywhere like solar can.
Build new nuclear power stations ???
Check out Sizewell C in the UK to see how well that's going
Solar panels have an expected life of around 20 years, batteries is likely much less than that, if countries went full solar they'd have to rebuild their entire countries energy production every 20 years or so…. It is an issue I see nobody mentioning yet nuclear could operate for 60-80 years possibly even longer and the newer reactor designs are much safer than current reactors, the newer reactors can also use current nuclear waste as fuel potentially solving much of the waste issue
How about solar for home domestic installations using the newest battery technology of sodium? Also, I just read that LFP batteries from CATL are dropping in price by 43%. The US is putting high tariffs on solar technology from China, while removing subsidies. Cheap natural gas will run out a lot sooner than hydrogen in the sun.
We appreciate your change in position. Unfortunately over a dozen gigawatts of German nuclear have shut down forever.
if the usa tool away subsidies for gas, oil, coal, and solar— i would still think solar with batteries can be lower. and its one and done…coal, gas, oil have to be constantly refilled.
I'm a bit disappointed in this video and am one of those panels that is considering unsubscribing.
I'm very familiar with the topic and this is video had quite many mistakes. Even the graph showed different result than that was spoken?
I really hope the videos on topics I'm not familiar with aren't this sloppy.
I couldn't find the source for the claim but I remember hearing once that places like California are having issue with both energy prices and blackouts after going heavy into solar and wind and even grid-scale batteries.
The reason being there's so much solar- especially residential solar- it ate away into gas profits- whilst the gas plant suffers efficiency issues from being forced to reduce output in the day as solar in prioritized. NOT ONLY that but they impose silly things like Carbon Credit systems on gas plants so they're actively punished (or outright banned) from generating "too much" power (and by extension CO2).
And then now there's the weird problem with selling residential solar capacity the price actually keeps going negative- ie you have to pay to get them to take off you because they have too much power / don't want to deal with the complication. Except you HAVE to get them to take the energy off you because you need to send the energy somewhere or it will damage the electrical equipment (oh hi, blackouts).
Now you could have high voltage power dump sources like resistive heaters in molten salt tanks but apparently they haven't figured that out yet. So that's fun
Even these estimates are far too generous. By the time you do a statistical analysis of extra capacity and storage to give you the current 99.9% of uptime in spite of night, seasons, and weather, you need probably triple the direct capital and still probably fall a couple of percent short, it's like trying to get to the speed of light or any event horizon, it's a lot harder than it looks. There's a much simpler way to cost it: first you need 100% coverage by conventional generation, then you add the solar on top, and then you idle the conventional now and then, when you can. Therefore whatever conventional costs, solar costs more, and means half your capital is sitting idle half of the time. Have a nice day.
Coal and gas are cheap if you forget the costs associated with bigger hurricanes, rising sea levels, worse disasters, etc..