Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.

I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail

▲

Heliosmaster 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.

▲

pzo 3 days ago | parent [-]

You would have to either cut forrest and trees or remove farm fields. I'm looking at my home town and I really don't see any barren land around many cities in Poland. I would rather they use those city outskirts land for new real estate that is lacking to deflate the bubble.

▲

biaachmonkie 2 days ago | parent [-]

Building roofs, parking lots, streets, rail tracks, etc.. are all spaces that could have a canopy installed overhead and solar panels providing power and shading. As solar panels continue to lower in cost the sides of buildings, fences, etc.. There are lots of opportunities to install solar panels in a crowded city.

	▲	pzo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		maintaining such infrastructure would be really costly: installing extra canopy, cleaning, removing snow (not easily accessible), extra inverters. I think solar only make sense if it's installed as solar farm (easy to maintain by one company) or in residential houses (owner maintain) or commercial units (owner maintain it). Solar prices went down but cost of installation and maintaining not much - this is the reason why many people in my family didn't buy it since it's still big investment and maintenance burden currently not worth the effort unless you are building new house.

▲

epistasis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Take all the land area that we currently devote to oil extraction, refining, delivery, etc.

Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.

Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.

Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.

▲

zekrioca 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Nuclear by itself isn’t either. A balanced mix is needed.