edentSolar 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...
Trading some corn-ethanol land for solar offers ‘tremendous opportunity’ | Cornell Chronicle
In the U.S., strategically converting a small fraction of land used to grow corn for ethanol to solar facilities could vastly increase energy production per hectare, as well as provide ecological benefits and financial resiliency for farmers.
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet?
Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.
I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...
Boise Bench Substation Battery Project - Idaho Power
Energy demand is growing by leaps and bounds as growth continues across the Treasure Valley. To help us continue our tradition of providing safe, reliable, affordable energy, Idaho Power plans to install batteries on approximately 10 acres at our Boise […]Read more
I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.