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epistasistoday at 6:10 AM1 replyview on HN

The biggest impediment to clean energy, which is actually cheaper than fossil fuels, is politics. We have political interference at the highest level to impede solar, storage, and wind.

In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian

This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...

And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.

And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...

This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.


Replies

perilunartoday at 7:16 AM

In Australia we have so much solar that wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day. Despite that we still have high retail prices. Domestic battery installations are getting popular and will help.

See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...