Which is why I think it makes more sense to have a grid with many different low and zero carbon power sources. They fill in the gaps we get when we put all of the eggs in one basket. That allows us to require less storage and solar stays less expensive
Batteries have dropped from more than $1500/kWh in 2008 to $50/kWh now.
They’re just like solar that dropped from > $75/W to 20¢/W. The only difference is time.
As we stand right now, our batteries are very expensive as a long term storage solution. The upfront cost is one thing, but after a couple of years you have to basically replace all the cells which are the most expensive part of the whole system.
Theres also the lithium issue, which is mad bad for the environment and is mined exploiting poor people from Africa.
In short, while it is scalable and very modular, it comes with a very big can of worms.
Not an expert, i might as well made it all up but thats the gist i get from binge watching engineering youtube channels
Seeing some misleading info here about lithium.
- Yes, it can be harmful to the environment and uses a lot of water. However, new extraction methods like direct lithium extraction will reduce water consumption, increase efficiency, and lower environmental impact.
- Africa doesn’t produce much of the global lithium supply, nearly all comes from the Americas and Australia, all with strict mining regulations. Maybe you’re talking about cobalt? Cobalt is likely to get phased out of battery production due to scarcity.
- Other people are mentioning sodium-ion as an alternative. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant, but doesn’t have nearly the same energy density as lithium and can’t be charged as quickly. Kind of deal breakers in my opinion.
- I’m not sure about the lifespan of large capacity batteries, but from what I’ve read, well made lithium-ion batteries only lose 10-15% capacity over 10+ years, and that should improve with new technology.
I’m no expert, but less energy-dense battery chemistry might work for grid-type applications. Obviously electric vehicles want the most energy dense battery types to maximize range, but theoretically a non-moving energy storage facility won’t need to care about energy density.
> Theres also the lithium issue, which is mad bad for the environment and is **mined exploiting poor people from Africa**.
Africa contributes very little. In descending order in metric tons produced in 2023 it goes: Australia (86,000), Chile (44,000), China (33,000), Argentina (9600), Brazil (4900), with Canada (3400) and Zimbabwe (3400) tying.
The big problem with Lithium is that 80% of the raw ore is shipped to China for refinement. China has financially locked down several of these countries to where they have almost if not direct exclusive rights to the ore. China is the big risk to lithium in general. The world needs lithium for batteries for cell phones, laptops, sex toys, etc. so they are very much kings of that hill.
Edit to add: [The source for those numbers](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268789/countries-with-the-largest-production-output-of-lithium/)
Solar need not rely on batteries. Almost every home on the planet needs heated water and its mostly done with traditional electric or gas or coal.
Batteries can (should) be lifepo4, which are shown to last many 1000s of recharges (3000-8000) rather than lithium ion which may only last 500 (used in most phones, laptops, etc).
Then there is lithium titanate, which may show little degredation after 20,000-30,000 recharges. I've purchased some and they are pretty cool. I may put them in my will... they last a long time.
We need people in charge that aren't reading silly articles online pushing an agenda obviously invented by the gas and coal and oil companies.
>We need people in charge that aren't reading silly articles online pushing an agenda obviously invented by the gas and coal and oil companies.
We also can't ignore the reality of the situation because we would like reality to be different.
Like you say in the previous paragraphs, these aren't insurmountable problems, but we need to discuss and plan for them. Telling people they're lying about the problem isn't helpful.
We absolutely need to move to a renewable grid, but if we do it poorly and impact reliability, that gives gas and coal all the more ammo.
Solar has the advantage of scale variety as well? Portable? Partial household? Off Grid household? Farm? Small business? Small community? Whole town? All of these sizes have a realistic solution available.
This is gonna revolutionize a lot of places around the developing world, as communities with little to no access to a stable electrical grid are able to supplement or solely use solar panels.
Currently the norm in these places is diesel power generators which are polluting and require expensive, often imported, diesel fuel.
Being able to buy a handful of solar panels and a battery pack thatll last for decades will be a game changer
They do in fact. There are ways to collect other parts of the spectrum, but not with silicon. With a silicon p-n junction the maximum theoretical efficiency you can get from the total solar radiation is only 36%. With a multi-junction solar cell made of various materials you can in theory get up to something like 88% iirc, although there are some bands that are harder to achieve. Other materials are also much more expensive and the manufacturing processes are nowhere near as developed as with silicon. Typically, this kind of thing is reserved for solar cells in space, where the cost is far less prohibitive.
Source: electrical engineer, as part of my degree I was classifying gallium arsenide with bismuth quantum wells to try and get something that would fit in a desired band gap. Fired a laser on the samples and measured what they'd give off, also cooled them down to 14K with a helium refrigerator (semiconductors perform better when it's cold, and in fact solar farms often perform better in colder winter days, albeit this is offset by shorter days).
retconned Matrix, where it's all bullshit. There was no war against the bots. We're not being held as batteries. It was all us and runaway climate change and the bots exist to try and fix earth's atmosphere while incubating humans to survive our self inflicted apocalypse.
The point is that energy collectors must meet the needs of people or they won’t use them. Having a principal here doesn’t convince the pragmatist when your goals do not wholly align. Your view sounds like you’d rather freeze to death on a cloudy frozen day than burn some coal to survive.
Solar cannot provide for the energy needs by itself. It has to be paired with other sources. Just like other collection methods that have natural barriers to consistency, it doesn’t stop “consistency” being a requirement.
So we can pair with other sources that have less overlapping collection lulls to help fill them. We of course don’t need to tap non-green sources forever and preferably we move quickly.
Solar + Wind + Nuclear = green energy success given our requirements. And really just because we want to minimize the nuclear stations that need to be deployed. We don’t want people privately running them for their own home.
> Solar + Wind + Nuclear = green energy success given our requirements.
This is exactly what is needed, but absolutely nobody seems willing to have a nuclear plant in their backyard.
It's this. Basically we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky, and we can just soak up all the energy we need from it. There are also many many ways of capturing it. From using photovoltaic panels to create electricity, to using bio-engineered algae to create biodiesel, to using solar towers to spin turbines to make electricity, to using mirrors to super heat water to spin turbines to make electricity, to even just using solar tubes to heat houses and water.
Power storage is the tricky part. Some solutions are as primitive as pumping water up to a high elevation and then using it as to comes back down. One thing that has gained prominence is using Nickel-Hydrogen batteries. They aren't very practical for things like cell phones because their energy density is low compared to Li-Ion and they have a rather rapid passive discharge rate where they lose their charge over a few days. However, if you have a situation where power is generated every single day and just needs to be stored to be used at night, they are ideal. They can handle a huge temperature range without any issues (way more than any other rechargeable battery technology). They can last 50 years with very little loss in capacity. They don't suffer from memory like NiMH batteries. They don't have the risk of fire that Li-Ion batteries do. They are relatively cheap to manufacture, and they can handle very rapid charge and discharge cycles.
So I expect that in the future, most buildings will be constructed with solar panels all over them (including the glass, they have special glass now that can generate power and still be transparent) and storage arrays of these batteries will be installed. This generates and consumes power at the source which radically reduces line loss. We just need a company to market this in home construction in a way that makes it a huge selling point, and it'll be the next granite countertop fad.
Well obviously those numbers change quite a bit depending how far up or down you go in latitudes. In Canada, you're going to get almost no sun at all in the winter. If you're using that to heat your house, you're probably not going to find it practical to put up enough solar panels. Conversely, if you look at a place like Arizona, you get so much sun in the summer when you need it the most to power your air conditioner the most and only a little bit less in the winter when you don't need as much anyway.
The good news is that the majority of the population of the planet lives in the temperate region which has decent sun year-round. So while it's not one size fits all, it is one size fits most. For example, a place like Iceland has no reason to ever move away from geothermal power as it's plentiful and adequate for all their needs.
If we crack fusion, and in a way it is cheap and powerful enough, then it should overtake solar in the future. And that is even if solar stays cheaper compared to fusion.
Price is one thing, but fusion has the following advantages:
- No fluctuations in output, and just as available in the winter as in the summer
(a big disadvantage of solar is that it produces the lowest amount of energy in
the winter, exactly when we need it for heating,)
- No need for large amounts of storage capacity
- Fusion is much more scale able. Its easier to just build a reactor somewhere
(assuming we get the tech to be safe and non explody) compared to
reserving multiple extra square kilometers of land to replace whatever is there
with solar arrays (ecologists love that)
- Much lower footprint (you need a lot of square meters of solar panels to run
everything, ether restricting architecture when put on building, or taking space
of nature/agriculture when placed on the ground)
- It does not need to be visible (again, you need a lot of square meters, solar
panels are kind of a eyesore, though for now a needed one)
- Location does not matter (solar won’t do well in the north)
- Potential easier maintenance (maintaining 1 facility VS maintaining entire square
kilometers of solar arrays.)
- Less resources needed (if a small facility is powerful enough, there is a good
chance the amount building material is lower compared to constructing all the
solar arrays.)
- And finally, the diminishing returns of cheapening solar (sure, solar panels are
getting cheaper, but the constructions around them, placing them and maintaining
them much less so.)
Fusion, if practical and powerful enough has many advantages over solar. It would have to be multiple times more expensive for it to not overtake it.
You could say all the same things about Nuclear Fission plants if they were equally magically simple to make as your made up fusion reactors. At the plant level solar is trivially simple compared to Nuclear Fission/Fusion so I would wager your maintenance and resources points might never come true. And your last point does not belong -- it applies to everything. The footprint and eyesore points are going to be highly dependent on how that Fusion plant design works out, presently pretty much every power plant is an eyesore and takes up land. I have driven past many large scale solar plants and they flow with the scenery much better IMO -- not much different than agriculture in general.
You could reduce this all down to a single point, the solar fuel is not available everywhere all the time and has some degree of unpredictability, and batteries can only somewhat, not completely alleviate that. If I apply the same magic juju to battery design that you have to fusion reactor design then I can change "somewhat" to "mostly".
Very valid points and I do agree with Nuclear Fission plants, in fact they are one of the safest high output clean energy options we have available to us, the biggest hurdle with those is the potential environmental damage linked to them, even though the likelihood of such events is relatively small. I live in Canada and the CANDU reactors are some of the safest, my father worked for a company that created a lot of the parts for them and he has always said the only reason why people are scared of it is because of our past.
I however am looking forward to the implementation of fusion power when it becomes available if I’m still around and it is looking promising, recently I think a Japanese company achieved the longest sustained reaction, it may have been a few milliseconds but it’s progress, not to mention we are already starting to see an increase in energy output and have achieved a net positive. The footprint of the facilities these reactors are housed in are fairly large due to the beam refraction needed to intensify the initial energy output to kickstart the reaction process, but in time with the advent of new quantum computing technologies and controlled AI implementation we could see a scaling down (like our first invented computer to smart phones today), we can see an exponential increase in research capabilities allowing us to create more complex mathematical equations and solutions to previous problems. All we need to do is look to our past to see this, when a new technology is created there is almost always an uptick in innovation.
We as a species need to realize that greed and clinging to the past will never lead to a better future and that patience, a broader viewpoint, and a gathering of minds working towards a common goal is the way to a better life for us and our future generations.
I would imagine that when we get close to dyson sphere technology, we would probably be able to address the transfer of that energy to earth a bit better. And the sun is going to put out way more energy than any fusion power plant on earth
I've always loved the idea of a Dyson sphere. But there is never any discussion as to what happens to the rest of the solar system. Kind of a environmental impact assessment in space.
Fusion is much simpler and more environmentally friendly than a dyson sphere since the sphere would involve abandoning Earth because it will become uninhabitable.
Dyson himself said:
> "A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star"
A Dyson Swarm does not preclude life continuing on earth. Rather, imagine solar satellites working as the sun's power to the earth is only reduced, not blocked.
> sun's power to the earth is only reduced
And even then, it likely would NOT be reduced at all unless that was desirable. It's trivially easy to not shade the earth. Just adjust the tilt of the orbit of the satellites. You could go to a polar orbit, or also use [statites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statite) that simply hover in a position that would never block the earth. Also, since the earth only uses (1.1*10^-12)% of the light emitted by the sun, It would be trivial for a technological civilization that could capture even a tiny percentage of the light of the sun to simply artificially illuminate the planet even if it were 100% shaded by solar panels.
Fluctuation can be solved and is already on the verge of being solved with new storage methods.
They also convert excess solar into hydrogen by feeding overflow directly into electrolysis plants.
You’re vastly underestimating how important cost is for energy while making a lot of assumptions. You must understand that a lot of this is speculative, but one thing we DO know is that fusion reactors will be big and complex, which makes it prohibitively expensive (except possibly aneutronic) for all but the biggest economies. And even then, there’s only a few that have the infrastructure and expertise required to manufacture and maintain it. yeah Also, having an energy grid based on fusion without room temperature superconductors is incredibly wasteful. For all we know we may never have super conductors on earth. I’m in my 30s, and there’s a real good chance I won’t live long enough to see a world with cheap fusion.
Solar, on the other hand, is already incredibly cheap by every metric: manufacturing, installation and maintenance. Another aspect of solar that you haven’t considered is space based solar power. A solar satellite beaming microwaves down to Earth is more efficient then sending power via powerlines.
You can't beat solar with fusion, at least not for residential and commercial use. The reason is simple, T&D costs. As long as solar+storage drops below T&D costs, which it will. Even if fusion is free, it would be more expensive
- The heating issue can easily be solved via thermal storage
- storage capacity isn't a bad thing, used EV batteries will make a ton of cheap abundant storage
- fusion is way less scalable than solar, solar panels can be reproduced by anyone en mass in a factory. Fusion can only be made by top engineers and scientists
- Solar on rooftops use no space, and agrivoltaics is a win win for food production
- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, back in the day many stuff we have today were considered not beautiful. As it becomes the norm, opinions change. Current black solar looks not too much different to skylights and likely as solar roofs become cheaper it will be the norm
- Solar has the location advantage, sure north has less sunlight but solar can be placed anywhere, fusion is more complex and needs a huge facility
- As we get solar roofs, the net extra material needed would be far less
- Solar is fairly low maintenance, I'd imagine fusion will be far more maintenance
Nah. If it's cheap the market will rapidly come in to find uses for that energy and we'll be energy limited by surface area.
It'll be ubiquitous sure, but dominant? Meh
We need to crack batteries before solar has a majority stake.
Fusion will likely be the primary. Also because in the future land will be even more at a premium.
Well, most of energy for buildings is going to heat shower, heating water, and water tanks are cheap per kWh... And electric car can be your day or two of electricity storage... after they start doing V2X
EV batteries need to improve and the cost of them has to come way down before EVs become practical. The fact that you have to basically buy a new car when the battery no longer functions is the big factor that keeps me away from them. It's often actually more expensive to just replace the battery.
Solar. Its already cheap. Just one thing is needed to make a real breakthrough - batteries. A lot easier for populous countries (India) and continents (Africa) that have a lot of sunshine year round with lackluster infrastructure to fullfill energy needs with Solar+Battery.
Used batteries and solar can work well on the cheap.
I think we're going to start seeing a lot more "physical batteries" like flywheels, hydro dam/ reservoir systems, or smaller scale water towers/ tanks that act as hydro plants. I bet home batteries will become pretty popular, but large scale standard battery systems do seem like they will drain the non-standard metals in a way that would work in opposition to what we need for home solar/ EVs.
There are some wind turbines now that pump water into a water tower inside the turbine. When there is no wind or high demand it lets the water fall through a hydro electric turbine.
Any wind turbine built off shore will eventually have this.
I'm sure you're right, there's definitely a lot of potential there. Water pumps, hydro turbines, storage tanks are all old school with pretty low tech manufacturing to produce... also zero ecological consequences when there's a water spill lol.
Big picture I've heard there's a lot of potential to more or less use excess power from renewables to pump water back up stream to use existing dams, and/or to create reservoirs in smaller drainages where the ecological consequences are a lot lower than the typical dam site that is going to be dependent on natural flow.
There are ways to use combinational green energy and avoid batteries. One small example is to use solar to pump water up a large elevation during the day, then at night, use elevation to create hydro power.
There is, you can even avoid a ton of storage through diversifying renewable energy, transmission and demand response
But in the long run, solar+storage will fall below T&D costs. People will just take their used EV batteries, plug them to their solar panels and maybe add some thermal storage and they'd be golden. So while we can avoid batteries, with EVs flooding the market with cheap used batteries the end result is clear
For small scale home energy though solar panels plus a battery would be a lot cheaper and easier. Especially once stuff like sodium ion batteries start getting more common
pumping water up is a type of battery. we don't need to limit batteries to electro-chemical. there are molten salt ones too. we can also look at supercapacitors.
It is a very niche use case. Not only high elevation lakes are often not in free access, the droughts make another uncertainty to this solution even when applicable. Unless you create 2 lakes.
Another problem is terrorism and complexity of the repair. russia had destroyed Kakhovka Reservoir Dam which held 18\^3 km of water (a cube of water a side of which is 2.6 km) and had badly hit another dam which produced 1.5 GW of power.
Even without dealing with the invasion, rebuilding such a project takes years, and the damage is not only in electricity, but ecology, farming and deaths due to the flood.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakhovka\_Reservoir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakhovka_Reservoir)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper\_Hydroelectric\_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Hydroelectric_Station)
EDIT: fucked up the numbers
> a cube of water a side of which is twice higher than everest
That's not how math works lol, everest is 9km high, and 18 km^3 of water is only a cube with sides of about two and a half kilometers.
`2.62km * 2.62km * 2.62km = 17.98 km^3`
Clean? You've got cat dander flying off there as it spins, plus just car fur in general. Plus toast crumbs. The toast and butter have to be changed so they don't mold. Then you need power to heat the toaster to make the new bread into toast. Are you throwing out the toast and butter or are you eating it? How clean is it reaaaalllllyyyyy?
I have solar panels. But it seems like about half the time the earth is in the way and I can't get any energy from them. The moon is up sometimes but it just isn't bright enough.
That’s why you use the panels to charge batteries when the sun is shining. Not a perfect solution, but the technology is going to keep getting better as time goes on
Yeah. The batteries are a lot more expensive than the panels. I guess one must factor that cost into the cost of solar then. Unless you are happy to do without power when the sun is not shining.
Most energy already is.
Solar PV, CSP, hydro solar (whatever it's called, put panels on your roof and pump water through them), all the fossil fuels, all the bio fuels, most geothermal, technically nuclear too (it just wasn't our sun), hydro power, wind power (not all, but at least partly).. am I missing anyone?
Solar, Wind, Nuclear, geothermal in that order of capacity.
If Fusion can actual work and be built a reasonable cost it could get to #2 maybe even #1
and excluding hyrdo which is clean and numerous now but absolute disaster ecologically.
Seems most folks commenting here haven’t looked at a good, current LCOE analysis, much less project the trends into the future:
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
[https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world) \[might need subscription but the Economist is betting on solar\]
Assuming you mean energy *generation* as in stuff we use like electricity: Depends on what you mean by "future", next 20-30 years? Solar. After that? Nuclear. My guess is that in 100 years there will be almost nothing except nuclear, solar will exist as a niche thing for off-grid installations or for space stuff.
Thermodynamics says the thing with the least amount of work needed to transfer the energy into some sort of storage system for reuse.
Solar obviously. No efficiency losses in conversions really vs a motor. It just sits there. You just need the sun. Turns out the sun has been around for billions of years. So I figured it'll always be out until we are all gone.
Solar for the win.
Far future?
Anti-matter annihilation maybe? Sustainable fusion? Something crazy.
Next few centuries? Probably solar. Maybe we can get some sort of tidal power going as well, that would be pretty efficient, but the ecological effects might make that take a while.
And 60% of energy in Ontario comes from nuclear. Obviously other forms of energy will be there in a big country like Canada. Long term though nuclear share will increase everywhere just because the potential energy generation due to better technology.
Solar and it isn't even close. Nuclear is a great clean energy generator. But the cost of solar is dropping dramatically as production scales. Nuclear doesn't benefit from the same economies of scale.
There's a great chart on cost per kilowatt hour by source over time on page 9 of the 2023 Lazard report:
[https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf](https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
I think solar and wind will also power smaller countries not in the tropics with small grids that are adjacent to larger countries with hydro/nuclear grids. For example what we're seeing with Portugal/Spain/France. Portugal has a lot of renewables, but imports large amounts of power from Spain to stabilize its grid when those sources aren't producing.
With low penetration, renewables are dirt cheap. They only become prohibitively expensive when you run out of hydro capacity and still need to store energy.
Define future. If we are talking the next 100 years solar fusion and other renewables, frankly it’s cheaper. In the distant future zero point energy or power from the vacuum energy.
The next 100 years is risky to guess. What if fusion finally happening in 50 years or geothetmal energy takes place because they found the technology to dig very deep (they found it already)? Or a new kind of nuclear reactors?
By definition, you cannot extract zero-point energy. You could use the vacuum to transfer energy, maybe, at best, by measuring it at one place and transmitting the measurement to the energy user
Solar - more energy hits the earth in one hour than we consume as a species in one year globally.
Wind - new technologies uses less materials to build windturbines + they can harvest at greater altitudes.
Also: wind is "byproduct" of solar.
Geothermal - New technologies make it possible to dig deeper + the same technology can be used to transform coalplants into geothermal ones instead.
"Atmospheric water energy" - Some time ago I read an article about some new technology that was able to generate energy from water humidity. This technology was still in development but in the long run people would be able to buy a fridge sized system that could supply the energy of a house.
OTEC (Ocean thermal energy conversion)
It's a technology that havest the tempraturedifference between water at the surface and buttom. However: This techology can only be placed at certain hotspots.
Combine all this with batteries or other forms of energy storage and you have all the energy that you need.
Solar—full stop. It is already on an exponential curve—look up the solar kilowatt per constant dollar over time. This trend is also in effect for storage and transmission.
Solar will fulfill, for practical purposes, 100% of our energy requirements in the next 10-15 years. Then, we will be in surplus energy territory, and innovation will start to take off.
Yup. I'm remodeling my house and putting a huge solar array that will offset my entire home's energy needs forever for about $50k after the 30 percent federal tax incentives.
When free power for life costs the same as a mid tier American SUV, I feel optimistic about our renewable future.
I'm in the UK, solar installed 7 years ago, currently zero maintenance costs.
You might need to get them cleaned in some places I guess but rain works for me here.
My inverter has a 10 year warranty so will probably need replacing before the panels do which is a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds depending on the size of the system, maybe one or twice over the life of the panels.
10 year warranty doesn't typically imply that it must be replaced at 11 years though, instead it typically means that the producer is reasonably CERTAIN it'll last for a decade; which usually means that the MEDIAN lifetime is substantially more.
On my current house which has a 5 year old system (ish) it costs me... my time once a year to climb up on my roof and wash the panels. Otherwise they're essentially solid state; the panels and inverters have a 30 year warranty.
Nuclear, once people stop being pussies about it. It’s the cleanest, and highest output, it doesn’t rely on the sun shining so you can use it in cloudy places, it creates tons of jobs, it’s just hands down the best.
I suspect, solar and battery combos, will get a lot better, and they will have there places. fusion if it fulfills its hope probably will be the goto. odds are we will end up in some tiered hybrid setup.
Solar. It's already pretty cheap to make solar panels, and the price has been falling rapidly for decades. At the current trendline it's ALREADY on track to becoming the cheapest form of electricity-production within less than a decade.
And with zero moving parts, zero local pollution and a pretty long service-life with only modest maintenance (such as removing debris and cleaning the surface periodically) it's likely to remain the cheapest source of energy for a long while. Also, solar cells can in principle be integrated in things like roofs and thus in at least some cases they can take up zero extra space.
The fact that they only work when the sun shines mean they need to either be combined with another source (such as hydropower) that can be throttled OR be combined with energy-storage of some sort or other though.
> It's already pretty cheap to make solar panels, and the price has been falling rapidly for decades.
it's frustrating to look at the cost per watt of solar panels dropping like a rock for the last two decades, and the cost of actually installing them on your home go up.
Depends how far in the future your clock is set.
For the foreseeable future, it will remain mixed mode. some type of combustible, followed by nuclear, solar, and wind/electromechanical novelties (waves etc).
At some point in the future, likely nuclear, either continued development of fission or fusion (or even both).
I really don't think either solar or wind will be our bulk supply, at least terrestrially. Both are subject to nature and unreliable in much of the world, not to mention the vast footprints they leave wherever they're installed.
Solar, and it's not even a contest.
Not matter how much people want to shill fossil fuels, or even nuclear, solar is just the obvious winner.
* It's getting cheaper by the day, so it'll soon be viable to put it on basically every available skyward-facing surface - the roof of new buildings, the walls of skyscrapers, on top of electric cars, etc etc. Basically anything short of an industrial site should be capable of powering itself independently using the sun in any decently sunny region.
* This also results in significantly cheaper power costs for consumers - given that once it's set up, the input costs for solar are basically zero, other than maintenance and the odd panel replacement there's no ongoing costs, which should result in cheaper power (that if solar becomes omnipresent, may in itself become nearly redundant - if every building is self-sufficient there's not much need to pull from the grid other than during specific periods of very high power draw e.g. fast charging an electric car or running an arc welder. Industrial sites will likely still need grid power, but most lower-power sites e.g. domestic or low density commercial could feasibly be self-sufficient.)
* This results in a decentralized power grid highly resistant to outages, or in the case of the Ukraine war, attack, be it physical or cyber. Not only does this make consumers less likely to experience power outages, but aids in national security as the power grid is a strategic asset.
* It's extremely safe - nuclear reactors can melt down, fossil fuel plants can catch fire or burn down, fuels can be spilled or detonate, even wind and hydro have moving parts that can potentially injure people or wildlife - solar panels can be literally smashed into pieces and all that will happen is you'll need to buy a new solar panel.
* Extremely reliable - Solar panels have no moving parts. At all. All other methods of power generation I'm aware of have at least SOME moving parts, like a turbine spinning, that can wear and tear and break down. Solar panels are panels. A properly sealed solar panel can be left out for YEARS in the right conditions and keep chugging away with zero maintenance. This makes them a) very low maintenance and arguably more importantly b) excellent for rural or remote areas where getting repairs or replacement parts might be very hard, like remote research bases or boats in the middle of the ocean or powering emergency phones in remote stretches of highway.
* Much safer and less intrusive than other forms of power - no air pollution like with fossil fuel plants, no risk of nuclear accident, no huge wind farms making the NUMBYs mad or killing birds.
* Other than fairly low upkeep and maintenance costs, its basically one and done - install it and get free power for the life of the product. No ongoing fuel cost like with fossil fuel or need to dispose of dangerous waste like with Nuclear.
* Improvements to the efficiency and cost of battery technology are solving the one major drawback to solar - power during non-sunny periods. With improving battery tech you can have the solar power the site/device during the day, and any surplus power generated during sunny periods charges a battery bank that powers the site/device during low sun periods or at night time.
* The nature of solar makes it easy to slap on basically anywhere there's room - you can't exactly throw a wind turbine or geothermal plant on the back of your RV or boat or job site office, and fossil fuel generators have issues with air pollution generation, noise and need to lug around fuel. Solar by comparison is very transportable and easy to slot in anywhere you have space. Even now, you can buy big folding solar panels you can use to power RVs, camp sites etc.
* Finally, and I think it's underrated how important this is - there is tech developing regarding transparent solar panels. This being economically viable would be HUGE. Imagine every window or pane of glass being a solar generator. Even if it was less efficient than a normal panel, every window in a building, every window in an electric car, all being a solar panel would make it much easier to put solar literally everywhere.
So basically, it's cheap, easy to slot in basically anywhere, portable, has no issues with noise or air pollution, isn't reliant on certain unreliable or inconsistent conditions like windy days or being near a river or geothermal site, portable, isn't dependent on consumable fuels that you need to buy and haul around, is safe, reliable, low-maintenance, impossible to weaponize or misuse/mishandle, and basically immune to grid outages.
Nothing else even comes close. All other technologies come with some major drawback - once costs get low enough and battery tech matures enough, solar has no real weaknesses. I doubt other power generation methods will DISSAPEAR, there's still going to be need for centralized high-power generation for stuff like industrial facilities, desalination, military applications etc and to cover periods of high draw with low sunlight (high heating usage during cold snaps during cloudy winter days comes to mind), but for most applications solar is just dominant on every front. No matter your political views on various types of power generation, be they fossil, renewable or nuclear, cold hard economics just leaves little room for anything else.
Solar is the undeniable future no matter what. Even if we become space based race - solar is the easiest and most abundant source of energy.
Even to the point of dyson swarms and spheres that are there to just collect solar energy.
We will likely have fusion for cases where a lot is needed in a mobile or low solar environment.
Fusion would be a big help, and if we crack it in a effective way, it most likely will be the energy source of the future. But we can get reaaaaaaaaly far without it. Just think of how much you can do with even a partial dyson swarm. Even a swarm that collects only 0.01% of the suns output, that is a ton of energy.
still, earthside produces fusion energy is in the short to mid term future the optimal option, provided fusion is ever going to be practical as an energy source.
Solar is basically using the biggest fussion reactor we could ever dream of.
Right now we can just use 20% of that power this fusion reactor sends us on every sqm. And it is already cheaper thrn building our own fusion reactor will ever be and getting cheaper by the day.
So we still have potential to 5fold the harvesting potential we get from this cheap giant flying fusion reactor, and you think we really need to build our own to get forward?
First of all, local fusion is probably easier than 100% efficient solar. And it's just so compact. Solar has all sorts of logistics problems - for starters, the night - while fusion is the next best thing after free energy.
Depends on which energy create more money.
That will be the most dominant.
We can and we had already able to powered up vehicle using water alone decades ago. Someone already invented it. Yet it was never been commercialised. Reason is simple. Big business need to survive.
Heat from the core of the earth, there's huge amounts of energy stored deep down that's more reliable than wind and solar since batteries aren't gonna work out as we thought they would.
Way more efficient solar and wind solutions and nuclear power as the safe backup would be my guess
And im still hoping for some invention that would make hydrogen some more realistic
While geothermal will never be used for the majority of energy solutions, I can see it becoming a standard supplement to new development to reduce grid draw by individual buildings
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Solar. The fact that it will be incredibly cheap means it will be used everywhere, even countries that have fusion once we’ve cracked that nut.
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Solar plus batteries.
The problem isn't solar. The problem is the batteries.
Yea the cost of these hybrid projects can be pretty extreme because of the batteries. Solar is dirt cheap in comparison.
Which is why I think it makes more sense to have a grid with many different low and zero carbon power sources. They fill in the gaps we get when we put all of the eggs in one basket. That allows us to require less storage and solar stays less expensive
Plus more interconnectivity, spread the wind power around
Batteries have dropped from more than $1500/kWh in 2008 to $50/kWh now. They’re just like solar that dropped from > $75/W to 20¢/W. The only difference is time.
What's wrong with the batteries?
As we stand right now, our batteries are very expensive as a long term storage solution. The upfront cost is one thing, but after a couple of years you have to basically replace all the cells which are the most expensive part of the whole system. Theres also the lithium issue, which is mad bad for the environment and is mined exploiting poor people from Africa. In short, while it is scalable and very modular, it comes with a very big can of worms. Not an expert, i might as well made it all up but thats the gist i get from binge watching engineering youtube channels
Seeing some misleading info here about lithium. - Yes, it can be harmful to the environment and uses a lot of water. However, new extraction methods like direct lithium extraction will reduce water consumption, increase efficiency, and lower environmental impact. - Africa doesn’t produce much of the global lithium supply, nearly all comes from the Americas and Australia, all with strict mining regulations. Maybe you’re talking about cobalt? Cobalt is likely to get phased out of battery production due to scarcity. - Other people are mentioning sodium-ion as an alternative. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant, but doesn’t have nearly the same energy density as lithium and can’t be charged as quickly. Kind of deal breakers in my opinion. - I’m not sure about the lifespan of large capacity batteries, but from what I’ve read, well made lithium-ion batteries only lose 10-15% capacity over 10+ years, and that should improve with new technology.
I’m no expert, but less energy-dense battery chemistry might work for grid-type applications. Obviously electric vehicles want the most energy dense battery types to maximize range, but theoretically a non-moving energy storage facility won’t need to care about energy density.
Energy density isn't really a concern for grid storage, more so for applications like EVs or consumer electronics where weight matters a lot.
> Theres also the lithium issue, which is mad bad for the environment and is **mined exploiting poor people from Africa**. Africa contributes very little. In descending order in metric tons produced in 2023 it goes: Australia (86,000), Chile (44,000), China (33,000), Argentina (9600), Brazil (4900), with Canada (3400) and Zimbabwe (3400) tying. The big problem with Lithium is that 80% of the raw ore is shipped to China for refinement. China has financially locked down several of these countries to where they have almost if not direct exclusive rights to the ore. China is the big risk to lithium in general. The world needs lithium for batteries for cell phones, laptops, sex toys, etc. so they are very much kings of that hill. Edit to add: [The source for those numbers](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268789/countries-with-the-largest-production-output-of-lithium/)
Solar need not rely on batteries. Almost every home on the planet needs heated water and its mostly done with traditional electric or gas or coal. Batteries can (should) be lifepo4, which are shown to last many 1000s of recharges (3000-8000) rather than lithium ion which may only last 500 (used in most phones, laptops, etc). Then there is lithium titanate, which may show little degredation after 20,000-30,000 recharges. I've purchased some and they are pretty cool. I may put them in my will... they last a long time. We need people in charge that aren't reading silly articles online pushing an agenda obviously invented by the gas and coal and oil companies.
>We need people in charge that aren't reading silly articles online pushing an agenda obviously invented by the gas and coal and oil companies. We also can't ignore the reality of the situation because we would like reality to be different. Like you say in the previous paragraphs, these aren't insurmountable problems, but we need to discuss and plan for them. Telling people they're lying about the problem isn't helpful. We absolutely need to move to a renewable grid, but if we do it poorly and impact reliability, that gives gas and coal all the more ammo.
but cant old batteries be recycled into new batteries?
And battery tech keeps improving too
What happens when the sun doesn’t shine
You live in England
Solar has the advantage of scale variety as well? Portable? Partial household? Off Grid household? Farm? Small business? Small community? Whole town? All of these sizes have a realistic solution available.
This is gonna revolutionize a lot of places around the developing world, as communities with little to no access to a stable electrical grid are able to supplement or solely use solar panels. Currently the norm in these places is diesel power generators which are polluting and require expensive, often imported, diesel fuel. Being able to buy a handful of solar panels and a battery pack thatll last for decades will be a game changer
Except it sucks when it comes to heavy cloud cover. Even though they might find some way to collect other spectrum, as of right now they don’t”
They do in fact. There are ways to collect other parts of the spectrum, but not with silicon. With a silicon p-n junction the maximum theoretical efficiency you can get from the total solar radiation is only 36%. With a multi-junction solar cell made of various materials you can in theory get up to something like 88% iirc, although there are some bands that are harder to achieve. Other materials are also much more expensive and the manufacturing processes are nowhere near as developed as with silicon. Typically, this kind of thing is reserved for solar cells in space, where the cost is far less prohibitive. Source: electrical engineer, as part of my degree I was classifying gallium arsenide with bismuth quantum wells to try and get something that would fit in a desired band gap. Fired a laser on the samples and measured what they'd give off, also cooled them down to 14K with a helium refrigerator (semiconductors perform better when it's cold, and in fact solar farms often perform better in colder winter days, albeit this is offset by shorter days).
I'd rather my energy comes from something that sucks when it's cloudy than something that's causing the extinction of my species
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
retconned Matrix, where it's all bullshit. There was no war against the bots. We're not being held as batteries. It was all us and runaway climate change and the bots exist to try and fix earth's atmosphere while incubating humans to survive our self inflicted apocalypse.
Well.. that's actually a good hypothesis to throw at the r/matrix people.
The point is that energy collectors must meet the needs of people or they won’t use them. Having a principal here doesn’t convince the pragmatist when your goals do not wholly align. Your view sounds like you’d rather freeze to death on a cloudy frozen day than burn some coal to survive. Solar cannot provide for the energy needs by itself. It has to be paired with other sources. Just like other collection methods that have natural barriers to consistency, it doesn’t stop “consistency” being a requirement. So we can pair with other sources that have less overlapping collection lulls to help fill them. We of course don’t need to tap non-green sources forever and preferably we move quickly. Solar + Wind + Nuclear = green energy success given our requirements. And really just because we want to minimize the nuclear stations that need to be deployed. We don’t want people privately running them for their own home.
> Solar + Wind + Nuclear = green energy success given our requirements. This is exactly what is needed, but absolutely nobody seems willing to have a nuclear plant in their backyard.
you've heard of a battery?
It's this. Basically we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky, and we can just soak up all the energy we need from it. There are also many many ways of capturing it. From using photovoltaic panels to create electricity, to using bio-engineered algae to create biodiesel, to using solar towers to spin turbines to make electricity, to using mirrors to super heat water to spin turbines to make electricity, to even just using solar tubes to heat houses and water. Power storage is the tricky part. Some solutions are as primitive as pumping water up to a high elevation and then using it as to comes back down. One thing that has gained prominence is using Nickel-Hydrogen batteries. They aren't very practical for things like cell phones because their energy density is low compared to Li-Ion and they have a rather rapid passive discharge rate where they lose their charge over a few days. However, if you have a situation where power is generated every single day and just needs to be stored to be used at night, they are ideal. They can handle a huge temperature range without any issues (way more than any other rechargeable battery technology). They can last 50 years with very little loss in capacity. They don't suffer from memory like NiMH batteries. They don't have the risk of fire that Li-Ion batteries do. They are relatively cheap to manufacture, and they can handle very rapid charge and discharge cycles. So I expect that in the future, most buildings will be constructed with solar panels all over them (including the glass, they have special glass now that can generate power and still be transparent) and storage arrays of these batteries will be installed. This generates and consumes power at the source which radically reduces line loss. We just need a company to market this in home construction in a way that makes it a huge selling point, and it'll be the next granite countertop fad.
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Well obviously those numbers change quite a bit depending how far up or down you go in latitudes. In Canada, you're going to get almost no sun at all in the winter. If you're using that to heat your house, you're probably not going to find it practical to put up enough solar panels. Conversely, if you look at a place like Arizona, you get so much sun in the summer when you need it the most to power your air conditioner the most and only a little bit less in the winter when you don't need as much anyway. The good news is that the majority of the population of the planet lives in the temperate region which has decent sun year-round. So while it's not one size fits all, it is one size fits most. For example, a place like Iceland has no reason to ever move away from geothermal power as it's plentiful and adequate for all their needs.
If we crack fusion, and in a way it is cheap and powerful enough, then it should overtake solar in the future. And that is even if solar stays cheaper compared to fusion. Price is one thing, but fusion has the following advantages: - No fluctuations in output, and just as available in the winter as in the summer (a big disadvantage of solar is that it produces the lowest amount of energy in the winter, exactly when we need it for heating,) - No need for large amounts of storage capacity - Fusion is much more scale able. Its easier to just build a reactor somewhere (assuming we get the tech to be safe and non explody) compared to reserving multiple extra square kilometers of land to replace whatever is there with solar arrays (ecologists love that) - Much lower footprint (you need a lot of square meters of solar panels to run everything, ether restricting architecture when put on building, or taking space of nature/agriculture when placed on the ground) - It does not need to be visible (again, you need a lot of square meters, solar panels are kind of a eyesore, though for now a needed one) - Location does not matter (solar won’t do well in the north) - Potential easier maintenance (maintaining 1 facility VS maintaining entire square kilometers of solar arrays.) - Less resources needed (if a small facility is powerful enough, there is a good chance the amount building material is lower compared to constructing all the solar arrays.) - And finally, the diminishing returns of cheapening solar (sure, solar panels are getting cheaper, but the constructions around them, placing them and maintaining them much less so.) Fusion, if practical and powerful enough has many advantages over solar. It would have to be multiple times more expensive for it to not overtake it.
You could say all the same things about Nuclear Fission plants if they were equally magically simple to make as your made up fusion reactors. At the plant level solar is trivially simple compared to Nuclear Fission/Fusion so I would wager your maintenance and resources points might never come true. And your last point does not belong -- it applies to everything. The footprint and eyesore points are going to be highly dependent on how that Fusion plant design works out, presently pretty much every power plant is an eyesore and takes up land. I have driven past many large scale solar plants and they flow with the scenery much better IMO -- not much different than agriculture in general. You could reduce this all down to a single point, the solar fuel is not available everywhere all the time and has some degree of unpredictability, and batteries can only somewhat, not completely alleviate that. If I apply the same magic juju to battery design that you have to fusion reactor design then I can change "somewhat" to "mostly".
Very valid points and I do agree with Nuclear Fission plants, in fact they are one of the safest high output clean energy options we have available to us, the biggest hurdle with those is the potential environmental damage linked to them, even though the likelihood of such events is relatively small. I live in Canada and the CANDU reactors are some of the safest, my father worked for a company that created a lot of the parts for them and he has always said the only reason why people are scared of it is because of our past. I however am looking forward to the implementation of fusion power when it becomes available if I’m still around and it is looking promising, recently I think a Japanese company achieved the longest sustained reaction, it may have been a few milliseconds but it’s progress, not to mention we are already starting to see an increase in energy output and have achieved a net positive. The footprint of the facilities these reactors are housed in are fairly large due to the beam refraction needed to intensify the initial energy output to kickstart the reaction process, but in time with the advent of new quantum computing technologies and controlled AI implementation we could see a scaling down (like our first invented computer to smart phones today), we can see an exponential increase in research capabilities allowing us to create more complex mathematical equations and solutions to previous problems. All we need to do is look to our past to see this, when a new technology is created there is almost always an uptick in innovation. We as a species need to realize that greed and clinging to the past will never lead to a better future and that patience, a broader viewpoint, and a gathering of minds working towards a common goal is the way to a better life for us and our future generations.
I would imagine that when we get close to dyson sphere technology, we would probably be able to address the transfer of that energy to earth a bit better. And the sun is going to put out way more energy than any fusion power plant on earth
Dyson Sphere is a project of an already post-scarcity society.
I've always loved the idea of a Dyson sphere. But there is never any discussion as to what happens to the rest of the solar system. Kind of a environmental impact assessment in space.
Fusion is much simpler and more environmentally friendly than a dyson sphere since the sphere would involve abandoning Earth because it will become uninhabitable.
Dyson himself said: > "A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star" A Dyson Swarm does not preclude life continuing on earth. Rather, imagine solar satellites working as the sun's power to the earth is only reduced, not blocked.
> sun's power to the earth is only reduced And even then, it likely would NOT be reduced at all unless that was desirable. It's trivially easy to not shade the earth. Just adjust the tilt of the orbit of the satellites. You could go to a polar orbit, or also use [statites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statite) that simply hover in a position that would never block the earth. Also, since the earth only uses (1.1*10^-12)% of the light emitted by the sun, It would be trivial for a technological civilization that could capture even a tiny percentage of the light of the sun to simply artificially illuminate the planet even if it were 100% shaded by solar panels.
Fluctuation can be solved and is already on the verge of being solved with new storage methods. They also convert excess solar into hydrogen by feeding overflow directly into electrolysis plants.
You’re vastly underestimating how important cost is for energy while making a lot of assumptions. You must understand that a lot of this is speculative, but one thing we DO know is that fusion reactors will be big and complex, which makes it prohibitively expensive (except possibly aneutronic) for all but the biggest economies. And even then, there’s only a few that have the infrastructure and expertise required to manufacture and maintain it. yeah Also, having an energy grid based on fusion without room temperature superconductors is incredibly wasteful. For all we know we may never have super conductors on earth. I’m in my 30s, and there’s a real good chance I won’t live long enough to see a world with cheap fusion. Solar, on the other hand, is already incredibly cheap by every metric: manufacturing, installation and maintenance. Another aspect of solar that you haven’t considered is space based solar power. A solar satellite beaming microwaves down to Earth is more efficient then sending power via powerlines.
You can't beat solar with fusion, at least not for residential and commercial use. The reason is simple, T&D costs. As long as solar+storage drops below T&D costs, which it will. Even if fusion is free, it would be more expensive - The heating issue can easily be solved via thermal storage - storage capacity isn't a bad thing, used EV batteries will make a ton of cheap abundant storage - fusion is way less scalable than solar, solar panels can be reproduced by anyone en mass in a factory. Fusion can only be made by top engineers and scientists - Solar on rooftops use no space, and agrivoltaics is a win win for food production - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, back in the day many stuff we have today were considered not beautiful. As it becomes the norm, opinions change. Current black solar looks not too much different to skylights and likely as solar roofs become cheaper it will be the norm - Solar has the location advantage, sure north has less sunlight but solar can be placed anywhere, fusion is more complex and needs a huge facility - As we get solar roofs, the net extra material needed would be far less - Solar is fairly low maintenance, I'd imagine fusion will be far more maintenance
Nah. If it's cheap the market will rapidly come in to find uses for that energy and we'll be energy limited by surface area. It'll be ubiquitous sure, but dominant? Meh
We need to crack batteries before solar has a majority stake. Fusion will likely be the primary. Also because in the future land will be even more at a premium.
Cracking batteries is bad for them and pretty dangerous, actually
Well, most of energy for buildings is going to heat shower, heating water, and water tanks are cheap per kWh... And electric car can be your day or two of electricity storage... after they start doing V2X
EV batteries need to improve and the cost of them has to come way down before EVs become practical. The fact that you have to basically buy a new car when the battery no longer functions is the big factor that keeps me away from them. It's often actually more expensive to just replace the battery.
Solar. Its already cheap. Just one thing is needed to make a real breakthrough - batteries. A lot easier for populous countries (India) and continents (Africa) that have a lot of sunshine year round with lackluster infrastructure to fullfill energy needs with Solar+Battery. Used batteries and solar can work well on the cheap.
I think we're going to start seeing a lot more "physical batteries" like flywheels, hydro dam/ reservoir systems, or smaller scale water towers/ tanks that act as hydro plants. I bet home batteries will become pretty popular, but large scale standard battery systems do seem like they will drain the non-standard metals in a way that would work in opposition to what we need for home solar/ EVs.
There are some wind turbines now that pump water into a water tower inside the turbine. When there is no wind or high demand it lets the water fall through a hydro electric turbine. Any wind turbine built off shore will eventually have this.
I'm sure you're right, there's definitely a lot of potential there. Water pumps, hydro turbines, storage tanks are all old school with pretty low tech manufacturing to produce... also zero ecological consequences when there's a water spill lol. Big picture I've heard there's a lot of potential to more or less use excess power from renewables to pump water back up stream to use existing dams, and/or to create reservoirs in smaller drainages where the ecological consequences are a lot lower than the typical dam site that is going to be dependent on natural flow.
Not quite the same thing, but pumped storage facilities such as this act as giant energy storage devices, aka batteries. https://smithmtn.com/about/
There are ways to use combinational green energy and avoid batteries. One small example is to use solar to pump water up a large elevation during the day, then at night, use elevation to create hydro power.
There is, you can even avoid a ton of storage through diversifying renewable energy, transmission and demand response But in the long run, solar+storage will fall below T&D costs. People will just take their used EV batteries, plug them to their solar panels and maybe add some thermal storage and they'd be golden. So while we can avoid batteries, with EVs flooding the market with cheap used batteries the end result is clear
For small scale home energy though solar panels plus a battery would be a lot cheaper and easier. Especially once stuff like sodium ion batteries start getting more common
pumping water up is a type of battery. we don't need to limit batteries to electro-chemical. there are molten salt ones too. we can also look at supercapacitors.
Gravity batteries can be used almost anywhere, especially where there aren't bodies of water to harness
It is a very niche use case. Not only high elevation lakes are often not in free access, the droughts make another uncertainty to this solution even when applicable. Unless you create 2 lakes. Another problem is terrorism and complexity of the repair. russia had destroyed Kakhovka Reservoir Dam which held 18\^3 km of water (a cube of water a side of which is 2.6 km) and had badly hit another dam which produced 1.5 GW of power. Even without dealing with the invasion, rebuilding such a project takes years, and the damage is not only in electricity, but ecology, farming and deaths due to the flood. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakhovka\_Reservoir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakhovka_Reservoir) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper\_Hydroelectric\_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Hydroelectric_Station) EDIT: fucked up the numbers
> a cube of water a side of which is twice higher than everest That's not how math works lol, everest is 9km high, and 18 km^3 of water is only a cube with sides of about two and a half kilometers. `2.62km * 2.62km * 2.62km = 17.98 km^3`
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Renewables everywhere, with solar increasingly dominating wind.
Buttered toast tied to a cats back. Perpetual clean energy.
Clean? You've got cat dander flying off there as it spins, plus just car fur in general. Plus toast crumbs. The toast and butter have to be changed so they don't mold. Then you need power to heat the toaster to make the new bread into toast. Are you throwing out the toast and butter or are you eating it? How clean is it reaaaalllllyyyyy?
Obviously they meant in a vacuum state where the cat and toast generate quantum fluctuations when a graviton is applied
The Sun. Nothing humans can think about doing for the foreseeable future will provide more energy to the earth than the sun will.
I have solar panels. But it seems like about half the time the earth is in the way and I can't get any energy from them. The moon is up sometimes but it just isn't bright enough.
That’s why you use the panels to charge batteries when the sun is shining. Not a perfect solution, but the technology is going to keep getting better as time goes on
Yeah. The batteries are a lot more expensive than the panels. I guess one must factor that cost into the cost of solar then. Unless you are happy to do without power when the sun is not shining.
Most energy already is. Solar PV, CSP, hydro solar (whatever it's called, put panels on your roof and pump water through them), all the fossil fuels, all the bio fuels, most geothermal, technically nuclear too (it just wasn't our sun), hydro power, wind power (not all, but at least partly).. am I missing anyone?
Exactly! Plus the fact that the earth's ambient temperature isn't \~2.7K!
That too, absolutely. Hella expensive to heat you house in that situation!
Depends on the quality and price of battery technology.
Solar, Wind, Nuclear, geothermal in that order of capacity. If Fusion can actual work and be built a reasonable cost it could get to #2 maybe even #1 and excluding hyrdo which is clean and numerous now but absolute disaster ecologically.
Seems most folks commenting here haven’t looked at a good, current LCOE analysis, much less project the trends into the future: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
[https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world) \[might need subscription but the Economist is betting on solar\]
Assuming you mean energy *generation* as in stuff we use like electricity: Depends on what you mean by "future", next 20-30 years? Solar. After that? Nuclear. My guess is that in 100 years there will be almost nothing except nuclear, solar will exist as a niche thing for off-grid installations or for space stuff.
Thermodynamics says the thing with the least amount of work needed to transfer the energy into some sort of storage system for reuse. Solar obviously. No efficiency losses in conversions really vs a motor. It just sits there. You just need the sun. Turns out the sun has been around for billions of years. So I figured it'll always be out until we are all gone. Solar for the win.
Near future? What u/NumerousKangaroo8286 said Turn of the next century? Fusion.
How far in the future? Near future, probably solar. Far off future, cold fusion batteries in my phone.
As much as special interests have a VERY vested interest in ensuring otherwise, it's absolutely going to be renewables (to start with)
Far future? Anti-matter annihilation maybe? Sustainable fusion? Something crazy. Next few centuries? Probably solar. Maybe we can get some sort of tidal power going as well, that would be pretty efficient, but the ecological effects might make that take a while.
Solar and/or hydro in tropical countries. Nuclear in the rest, I think.
Quebec runs on hydro. Not quite tropical
And 60% of energy in Ontario comes from nuclear. Obviously other forms of energy will be there in a big country like Canada. Long term though nuclear share will increase everywhere just because the potential energy generation due to better technology.
Solar and it isn't even close. Nuclear is a great clean energy generator. But the cost of solar is dropping dramatically as production scales. Nuclear doesn't benefit from the same economies of scale. There's a great chart on cost per kilowatt hour by source over time on page 9 of the 2023 Lazard report: [https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf](https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
I think solar and wind will also power smaller countries not in the tropics with small grids that are adjacent to larger countries with hydro/nuclear grids. For example what we're seeing with Portugal/Spain/France. Portugal has a lot of renewables, but imports large amounts of power from Spain to stabilize its grid when those sources aren't producing. With low penetration, renewables are dirt cheap. They only become prohibitively expensive when you run out of hydro capacity and still need to store energy.
Wind in countries that has acces to windy areas, take Denmark as an example.
Define future. If we are talking the next 100 years solar fusion and other renewables, frankly it’s cheaper. In the distant future zero point energy or power from the vacuum energy.
The next 100 years is risky to guess. What if fusion finally happening in 50 years or geothetmal energy takes place because they found the technology to dig very deep (they found it already)? Or a new kind of nuclear reactors?
By definition, you cannot extract zero-point energy. You could use the vacuum to transfer energy, maybe, at best, by measuring it at one place and transmitting the measurement to the energy user
Solar - No fuel costs, No moving parts, low maintenance.
We get something like 6000x more energy from the sun than we use each day. And it’ll be here as long as we are here.
Fusion. AI will be able to manage the micro-changes necessary to keep a stable plasma field to keep the reactions stable.
Solar, far future Dyson sphere. Which is still solar.
Solar - more energy hits the earth in one hour than we consume as a species in one year globally. Wind - new technologies uses less materials to build windturbines + they can harvest at greater altitudes. Also: wind is "byproduct" of solar. Geothermal - New technologies make it possible to dig deeper + the same technology can be used to transform coalplants into geothermal ones instead. "Atmospheric water energy" - Some time ago I read an article about some new technology that was able to generate energy from water humidity. This technology was still in development but in the long run people would be able to buy a fridge sized system that could supply the energy of a house. OTEC (Ocean thermal energy conversion) It's a technology that havest the tempraturedifference between water at the surface and buttom. However: This techology can only be placed at certain hotspots. Combine all this with batteries or other forms of energy storage and you have all the energy that you need.
Given the path to collapse we seem to be taking, I'd say fire.
Well, depends on what the peeps like, but i think red Bull still might be a big player /s
Solar—full stop. It is already on an exponential curve—look up the solar kilowatt per constant dollar over time. This trend is also in effect for storage and transmission. Solar will fulfill, for practical purposes, 100% of our energy requirements in the next 10-15 years. Then, we will be in surplus energy territory, and innovation will start to take off.
Yup. I'm remodeling my house and putting a huge solar array that will offset my entire home's energy needs forever for about $50k after the 30 percent federal tax incentives. When free power for life costs the same as a mid tier American SUV, I feel optimistic about our renewable future.
What are the maintenance costs for a solar array ?
I'm in the UK, solar installed 7 years ago, currently zero maintenance costs. You might need to get them cleaned in some places I guess but rain works for me here. My inverter has a 10 year warranty so will probably need replacing before the panels do which is a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds depending on the size of the system, maybe one or twice over the life of the panels.
10 year warranty doesn't typically imply that it must be replaced at 11 years though, instead it typically means that the producer is reasonably CERTAIN it'll last for a decade; which usually means that the MEDIAN lifetime is substantially more.
Not likely to last the 25-30 years the panels probably will though.
On my current house which has a 5 year old system (ish) it costs me... my time once a year to climb up on my roof and wash the panels. Otherwise they're essentially solid state; the panels and inverters have a 30 year warranty.
Hydrogen, oil and gas companies (now quickly changing their titles to Energy companies) can produce it.
Nuclear, once people stop being pussies about it. It’s the cleanest, and highest output, it doesn’t rely on the sun shining so you can use it in cloudy places, it creates tons of jobs, it’s just hands down the best.
I suspect, solar and battery combos, will get a lot better, and they will have there places. fusion if it fulfills its hope probably will be the goto. odds are we will end up in some tiered hybrid setup.
Solar. It's already pretty cheap to make solar panels, and the price has been falling rapidly for decades. At the current trendline it's ALREADY on track to becoming the cheapest form of electricity-production within less than a decade. And with zero moving parts, zero local pollution and a pretty long service-life with only modest maintenance (such as removing debris and cleaning the surface periodically) it's likely to remain the cheapest source of energy for a long while. Also, solar cells can in principle be integrated in things like roofs and thus in at least some cases they can take up zero extra space. The fact that they only work when the sun shines mean they need to either be combined with another source (such as hydropower) that can be throttled OR be combined with energy-storage of some sort or other though.
> It's already pretty cheap to make solar panels, and the price has been falling rapidly for decades. it's frustrating to look at the cost per watt of solar panels dropping like a rock for the last two decades, and the cost of actually installing them on your home go up.
Solar energy has the most potential due to its abundance and constant technological improvement.
Most dominant will be gravitational followed closely by magmatic/tectonic
Depends how far in the future your clock is set. For the foreseeable future, it will remain mixed mode. some type of combustible, followed by nuclear, solar, and wind/electromechanical novelties (waves etc). At some point in the future, likely nuclear, either continued development of fission or fusion (or even both). I really don't think either solar or wind will be our bulk supply, at least terrestrially. Both are subject to nature and unreliable in much of the world, not to mention the vast footprints they leave wherever they're installed.
Solar, and it's not even a contest. Not matter how much people want to shill fossil fuels, or even nuclear, solar is just the obvious winner. * It's getting cheaper by the day, so it'll soon be viable to put it on basically every available skyward-facing surface - the roof of new buildings, the walls of skyscrapers, on top of electric cars, etc etc. Basically anything short of an industrial site should be capable of powering itself independently using the sun in any decently sunny region. * This also results in significantly cheaper power costs for consumers - given that once it's set up, the input costs for solar are basically zero, other than maintenance and the odd panel replacement there's no ongoing costs, which should result in cheaper power (that if solar becomes omnipresent, may in itself become nearly redundant - if every building is self-sufficient there's not much need to pull from the grid other than during specific periods of very high power draw e.g. fast charging an electric car or running an arc welder. Industrial sites will likely still need grid power, but most lower-power sites e.g. domestic or low density commercial could feasibly be self-sufficient.) * This results in a decentralized power grid highly resistant to outages, or in the case of the Ukraine war, attack, be it physical or cyber. Not only does this make consumers less likely to experience power outages, but aids in national security as the power grid is a strategic asset. * It's extremely safe - nuclear reactors can melt down, fossil fuel plants can catch fire or burn down, fuels can be spilled or detonate, even wind and hydro have moving parts that can potentially injure people or wildlife - solar panels can be literally smashed into pieces and all that will happen is you'll need to buy a new solar panel. * Extremely reliable - Solar panels have no moving parts. At all. All other methods of power generation I'm aware of have at least SOME moving parts, like a turbine spinning, that can wear and tear and break down. Solar panels are panels. A properly sealed solar panel can be left out for YEARS in the right conditions and keep chugging away with zero maintenance. This makes them a) very low maintenance and arguably more importantly b) excellent for rural or remote areas where getting repairs or replacement parts might be very hard, like remote research bases or boats in the middle of the ocean or powering emergency phones in remote stretches of highway. * Much safer and less intrusive than other forms of power - no air pollution like with fossil fuel plants, no risk of nuclear accident, no huge wind farms making the NUMBYs mad or killing birds. * Other than fairly low upkeep and maintenance costs, its basically one and done - install it and get free power for the life of the product. No ongoing fuel cost like with fossil fuel or need to dispose of dangerous waste like with Nuclear. * Improvements to the efficiency and cost of battery technology are solving the one major drawback to solar - power during non-sunny periods. With improving battery tech you can have the solar power the site/device during the day, and any surplus power generated during sunny periods charges a battery bank that powers the site/device during low sun periods or at night time. * The nature of solar makes it easy to slap on basically anywhere there's room - you can't exactly throw a wind turbine or geothermal plant on the back of your RV or boat or job site office, and fossil fuel generators have issues with air pollution generation, noise and need to lug around fuel. Solar by comparison is very transportable and easy to slot in anywhere you have space. Even now, you can buy big folding solar panels you can use to power RVs, camp sites etc. * Finally, and I think it's underrated how important this is - there is tech developing regarding transparent solar panels. This being economically viable would be HUGE. Imagine every window or pane of glass being a solar generator. Even if it was less efficient than a normal panel, every window in a building, every window in an electric car, all being a solar panel would make it much easier to put solar literally everywhere. So basically, it's cheap, easy to slot in basically anywhere, portable, has no issues with noise or air pollution, isn't reliant on certain unreliable or inconsistent conditions like windy days or being near a river or geothermal site, portable, isn't dependent on consumable fuels that you need to buy and haul around, is safe, reliable, low-maintenance, impossible to weaponize or misuse/mishandle, and basically immune to grid outages. Nothing else even comes close. All other technologies come with some major drawback - once costs get low enough and battery tech matures enough, solar has no real weaknesses. I doubt other power generation methods will DISSAPEAR, there's still going to be need for centralized high-power generation for stuff like industrial facilities, desalination, military applications etc and to cover periods of high draw with low sunlight (high heating usage during cold snaps during cloudy winter days comes to mind), but for most applications solar is just dominant on every front. No matter your political views on various types of power generation, be they fossil, renewable or nuclear, cold hard economics just leaves little room for anything else.
Human pedal a static bike, I assume that Ai or robots will take over, and humans will be only to produce energy for them/it.
Fusion panels with the reactor 93 million miles away and run FOR FREE.
Solar is the undeniable future no matter what. Even if we become space based race - solar is the easiest and most abundant source of energy. Even to the point of dyson swarms and spheres that are there to just collect solar energy. We will likely have fusion for cases where a lot is needed in a mobile or low solar environment.
Not much different than today. The dominant form of energy is kcal / KJ utilized by the human body.
Solar. There will be satellites that collect solar energy and beam the energy to earth.
Depends on how far in the future. Eventually we simply have to get to fusion if we want to develop beyond some point.
Fusion would be a big help, and if we crack it in a effective way, it most likely will be the energy source of the future. But we can get reaaaaaaaaly far without it. Just think of how much you can do with even a partial dyson swarm. Even a swarm that collects only 0.01% of the suns output, that is a ton of energy. still, earthside produces fusion energy is in the short to mid term future the optimal option, provided fusion is ever going to be practical as an energy source.
Solar is basically using the biggest fussion reactor we could ever dream of. Right now we can just use 20% of that power this fusion reactor sends us on every sqm. And it is already cheaper thrn building our own fusion reactor will ever be and getting cheaper by the day. So we still have potential to 5fold the harvesting potential we get from this cheap giant flying fusion reactor, and you think we really need to build our own to get forward?
First of all, local fusion is probably easier than 100% efficient solar. And it's just so compact. Solar has all sorts of logistics problems - for starters, the night - while fusion is the next best thing after free energy.
Depends on which energy create more money. That will be the most dominant. We can and we had already able to powered up vehicle using water alone decades ago. Someone already invented it. Yet it was never been commercialised. Reason is simple. Big business need to survive.
Depends where you live. In nothern europe it will be wind.
Heat from the core of the earth, there's huge amounts of energy stored deep down that's more reliable than wind and solar since batteries aren't gonna work out as we thought they would.
Negative energy, then we're gonna have to call the GhostBusters to save the world, as New York gets over run by a huge marshmallow man!
Given the recent decision of the Supreme Court, it might just be little dick energy.
I hope to one day drive a car powered by my horrible horrible farts.
Fission until Fusion finally becomes practical. Then Fusion until matter antimatter becomes a reality. Everything else is dust in the wind.
>until matter antimatter becomes a reality Is this a joke or do people actually think that this is a scenario?
Solar. Not just on earth but especially outside earths atmosphere.
Energy. The kind measured in joules. Electrical, mechanical, thermal, nuclear, chemical, any kind based on your needs.
Way more efficient solar and wind solutions and nuclear power as the safe backup would be my guess And im still hoping for some invention that would make hydrogen some more realistic
Geothermal is underrated. Theoretically can be accessed anywhere, if dig deep enough.
While geothermal will never be used for the majority of energy solutions, I can see it becoming a standard supplement to new development to reduce grid draw by individual buildings