Chinese also have battery manufacturing, whose rapidly falling cost-curve is what is missing to enable 24/7 solar.

American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.

jandrese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You just slightly missed the crux of the issue here.

The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.

Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.

That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.

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citrin_ru 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.

It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.

	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		8% of electricity, not total world energy. But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently. PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).
	▲	anon7725 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.

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kllrnohj 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.

No we won't. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted the entire planet to solar today, there would still be new installations tomorrow because energy demand is infinite. There's never enough, we've always used more energy as more energy sources were available.

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xbmcuser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

True but there are 2 technology converges that are happening at the same time cheap energy that is getting cheaper. And automation powered by that energy that also gets cheaper as energy gets cheaper as well as efficiency gains. The current world economic systems and most government systems are unlikely to survive the upheaval that this will cause in the next 15-20 years.

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yoyohello13 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like renewable maintenance companies will make a killing.

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ViewTrick1002 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

An interesting prospect is the grids getting smaller. Becoming distributed again.

Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.

When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.

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pksebben an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.

The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.

I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.

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BLKNSLVR 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if the US gets it's shit together it's already lost the solar and battery fight. It will have to win the next one - which it might do with AI.

	▲	maxerickson an hour ago \| parent [-]
		What does it mean to lose? Like we can, uh, transfer the technology and build at whatever cost we can build at. Good luck to China charging us more than that cost.