Solar and batteries can power the world

Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...

I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.

The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.

I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.

The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.

I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com

> solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp

Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.

Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.

This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda.

The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.

For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.

1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status.

Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.

If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.

The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.

If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.

That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.

It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.

Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.

Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".

It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.

No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.

EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.

Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago.

"a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...

See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?

Once you take politics out of solar, EVs and batteries we’re all in agreement. Do your part, do your fair share, don’t wait.

What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.

We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery cartel and everything will be better. Right.

I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)

They can and they will. In the longer term there simply won't be anything else.

This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have:

- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;

- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;

- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;

- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;

- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.

I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.

Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.

Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".

So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.

Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.

Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.

That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.

>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

I think a lot of people truly dont get this.

Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.

It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.

Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.

Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.

No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.

China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.

Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."

The "storeable fuel

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.

And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.

And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.

I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.

That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.

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Disappointed the article doesn't transmission of electricity and how little the loss is. People are quite surprised that it's like 3.5% per 1000 km.

We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?

By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.

It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.

Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.

EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.

California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.