But what happens after that up front cost?? With the current price of a barrel of sun, can we really afford to limit fossil fuels?
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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I bought a 1 kg rest mass barrel of sunshine, and... boy howdy, for the price I might as well have purchased 1.8 times 10^15 joules from the energy grid.
1kg rest mass of sunlight in a barrel is objectively horrifying lol. Napkin math says thats ~9e19J. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated on earth, produced ~2.1e17J. You've got a barrel containing ~440 Tsar bomba detonations
I'm glad it doesn't exist. That committee trying to design warning signs for permanent nuclear waste storage would have a field day. "The inner lining is only 99.99999999999999999999999999% reflective while it's in this certain temperature range. Do not inhale or exhale forcefully in the vicinity." is a non-starter.
You don't measure sun in barrels. It comes in bars.
So do I.
How many?
All of them.
That creates a logistical problem.
Yeah but you have to pay for the sunshine every year that you use to power the panels. And you have to build pipelines to transport that sunshine from the faraway places where it's developed, and sometimes you have to liquefy it a load it onto gigantic tanker ships and carry it overseas, and there's always a risk of it exploding and...oh, wait. I'm thinking of the gas. Never mind.
Think of all the sunshine jobs.
To be fair, NG was sunshine at one point.
Yes, but have you considered that using renewables means you're gay? Checkmate liberals.
The propagandized will continue parroting their fossil fuel talking points and will continue to vote for the politicians that collect fossil fuel money.
Why do you say it like it's an eternal inevitability? Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda because it has to be maintained at a certain pressure to effectively change someone's behavior. The solution to the propaganda problem, then, is to combat propaganda, not wring our hands in despair. We've been busting up propaganda rings since the dawn of the written word, it can be done. Just needs people to do it.
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They already moved on to different tactics like restricting the ability to connect solar to the grid or simply burying all applications in red tape for years.
Idk, it's working pretty great for me.
My experience: https://lemmy.world/post/32326227
But you are not scalable.
The companies that in my country have already applied for grid connections of more solar and battery capacity than would be needed in the next few years yet waiting and waiting and at some point just giving up would be.
Oh, and now law changes will also kill all future plans as no one will build any more solar with their own money (or get loans from banks) after the decision if they can actually feed in their produced electricity is shifted to the control of grid providers all-well connected or subsidiaries with fossil-fuel focused energy companies.
Economic viability means shit if it gets fought actively on the government level.
they are going pretty hard in maintaining gas and oil production
Probably true in every market that is not the US, with extreme tariffs and EOs banning solar technology.
This is true when comparing to peaker gas/coal plants which are less efficient than more expensive Combine Cycle plants, though both can still run 24/7. The myth of baseload as a requirement ignores that "outside of heating or extreme summer night heat" night demand is half of day/evening demand.
Batteries are now extremely cheap as well, and certainly the combo compared to Combined Cycle is cheaper for better baseload coverage because combined cycle/baseload must overprovide daily needs by meeting peak demand, while solar+batteries can better cover full day needs.
The absolute clincher though is price certainty for 30 years. Free from extortion or geopolitical oppression/chaos of fuel supply chains. Global warming has direct costs to property values, insurance costs, and food scarcity. US policy has moved to create global fuel scarcity for increased dependence on US, as well.
Get ready for "Economic rationalists" having a meltdown in 5.. 4.. 3...
We could use the excess power to bank carbon, then if we need more power we can burn that same carbon.
Edit: This isn't to be efficient, it's to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reverse global warming. I meant that being able to use it as emergency fuel would just be a perk.
Seems super complicated when you could just pump water up a hill, then open a dam when we need more power.
My bad, the carbon banking would be to clean the atmosphere, being able to burn it is just a side effect.
Pumped hydroelectric storage is really hard to do at scale, because gravitational potential energy requires a gargantuan amount of mass raised a very tall height.
A containerized battery storage system can fit up to 5 MWh of storage in a single 40-ft shipping container. 5MWh is 18 gigajoules, or 18,000,000,000 joules.
Raising 1 kg (or 1 liter of water) by 1 meter stores 9.8 joules of gravitational potential energy. So you need to scale this upwards and find 1.8 billion to fit into mass or height in order to match the storage of one measly shipping container battery system. So basically any gravity storage system needs very favorable geography, and can't really scale the way that battery storage systems can.
Right, but I was comparing pumped hydro electric to carbon capture for fuel...
I'm still hopeful for synthetic hydrocarbon production from power-to-liquid Fischer-Tropsch processes, especially the ones that convert captured CO2 and H2 into kerosene for jet fuel. That same 5 MWh/18 gigajoules of energy I was discussing in my earlier comment can be stored in about 390 kg of synthetic kerosene, at 46.4 MJ/kg.
There's no doubt that it will require a lot of technological and engineering advancement for carbon capture + hydrolysis + the whole PtL process to approach the round trip energy efficiency of charging a lithium ion battery (90%) or pumped hydro (75%), but if we do intentionally overbuild solar and run the chemical plants at near-negative energy prices based on time of day, it could lead to a more broadly sustainable global supply chain for decarbonizing existing fossil fuel systems (like airplane jet engines).
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