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Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time
(www.carbonbrief.org)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
398 points (98.8% liked)
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Noone ever believes me when I tell them that at >20% yearly growth, solar alone is going to overtake fossil in a decade
People don't understand how growth works. And there's a lot of fossil fuel propaganda ("what are you going to do at night / when there's no wind"). You can deal with those things using batteries, pumped storage and by shifting load.
Solar panel cost drops -50% each 11-12 years too. It's crazy actually.
I have done some napkin calculations and those 400W balcony panels (full kit) are paid off in around 5 years. And it's just getting better and better.
ROI of on-grid solar, just in general, is 5-7 years. Down from 10-15 some 10-15 years ago.
Depends on the location and season, but yeah, I can see that.
Then we must invent some way of transporting electricity, like cables, pylons or something 😉
Throw the electricity into the trunk of my car I'll drive it over to the next town that needs it. Just clear some room next to my backpack
You jest but EVs are a great way to compensate over night fluctuations. If we had a grid that supports it and enough EVs charging at home.
I wish we had smarter chargers for this. While I don’t accept using my battery to reinforce the grid without significant payback, I’m more than willing to dynamically schedule charging.
Why can’t I set it to “charge to 80% by morning, during times that help the power company”? If enough people do this we should be able to smooth out the overnight load to something consistent and predictable to match whatever generation is online
My energy provider in the Netherlands provides something kind of like this, if you install a compatible EV charger it can charge when it's cheapest (which I assume correlates).
Some places here also have time of use metering. However as far as I know it’s old style fixed schedule, like 11p-5am or something.
This is an opportunity to be a lot more dynamic to help the utility smooth the load better.
We had time of use metering where I grew up, but at the time the only intelligence we had was a timer. Now we have $50k+ vehicles with an ai computer - it better be capable of more
And resilient batteries.
Valid concern but there are very promising results for recycling or restoring lithium batteries. The future might be bright.
That's probably the most important part (ecology) but if the battery wears out faster, people well not like that (batteries are expensive).
But I also do think the future will be bright!
They probably don’t believe you because most of the time a 20% growth rate doesn’t just stay constant for a decade, allowing for such simplistic extrapolations. There are examples to the contrary. But a 20% growth rate means 750% growth over 10 years and that is a lot.
Of course it will, but its too late. We need it now.