this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Great comments in here that understand the actual issues, instead of, ya' know, the usual.
Something I haven't seen in the thread: Can someone address the costs of keeping the infrastructure maintained? Free power sounds great, but it can never be free. Entire industries must be paid to manufacture pylons, wire, transformers, substations, all that. Then there are the well paid employees who are our boots on the ground. (Heroes to me!)
How is solar disrupting the infra costs?
The actual issue, as stated in the original article is value deflation, aka investors not making enough money to justify energy transition to a timeline where humanity still exists in 100 years. Decoupling the issue from the political and economic aspect is disingenuous at best.
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Hear me out: a giant water balloon. Roughly the size of the sun.
This feels like it is begging for further context.
If anyone is curious as to why we don't run the world off solar, from what I understand the big issue is power grid frequency. Unlike a turbine, solar has no intertia. If you take away light the power drop is instant. With turbines, they keep spinning due to their weight. This is especially important since if a large load is suddenly energized, the turbine might slow down but still won't stop immediately. Maybe in the future giant electric powered flywheels or pumpgen systems can take up the slack. Nuclear would likely also help since those are essentially giant steam turbine generators. Good video with some more info here.
Those flywheels are already being installed right now
https://www.neso.energy/news/first-phase-stability-pathfinders-delivered
As a solar punk, I have solar panels, some batteries, and all my stuff runs off USB or 12v. I don't pay utilities
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Hear me out: pump the excess solar power from the sunny side of Earth via maser into space at a geostationary microwave mirror array that reflects and focuses power back at a ground station on the dark side of Earth.