Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

> The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.

I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.

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.

China will replace Oil (+Fossil fuel) based ecosystems and applications of energy. Think about all the Oil wealth, but add on energy storage, an unsolved problem of mankind, and all the applications of energy production+storage. We already see this dominance in EVs. Soon, everything else will be replaced. We live in interesting times!

>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution

the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.

California power generation profile yesterday showing solar and battery proportion.

https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/...

Panels prices bottomed about a year ago below many manufacturer's cash cost, and have gone mostly sideways since. https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index

If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.

Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.

Also, the US has a lot of influence over the flow of oil in the world. A world of cheap solar energy removes that influence.

Someone desperately needs to build the largest solar farm on earth, nakedly as a direct affront to China, and call it the "The Grand Trump Sun Energy Complex", with a large statue of him standing at the center of the massive radial field of panels.

The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.

It's just so breathtakingly OBVIOUS. And it has been for a decade. Yet we have done nearly nothing.

I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.

The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.

"Drill baby drill" as he said this week.

He doesn't care about solar because it does nothing to boost his narcissism. Simple as that. He can't take credit for it. It doesn't boost his image. It's just a simple quiet thing sitting there working.

Some comment I read I keep coming back to. They (elites) will risk everything to give up nothing.

The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.

You refuse to understand the difference between capacity and utilization. That mass of solar still only makes about 1/6th the actual number of watts of power delivered to the grid. Anyone who shows you capacity numbers about energy generation is intentionally lying to you. Capacity factor matters. The capacity factor of nuclear is .9. For Hydro and FF, its .6. For solar its .1. That means 9 watts of solar capacity generates the same amount of power as 1 watt of nuclear capacity or 1.5 watts of Hydro capacity. That's why you keep getting shown capacity instead of utilization (the number that matters).

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

More or less.

Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.

In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.

In the US the invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated slavery, which prior to that point had been declining. In the Antebellum south, slavery was profitable, with average return on slaves of about 8 to 10%. Even after slavery was legally abolished, extremely similar social institutions remained for decades (share cropping + institutionalized racism). It wasn't until the 1940s that cotton picking was mechanized.

The North steamrolled the South economically because manufacturing steamrolls agriculture in terms of productivity, but an apples to apples comparison between farmers shows slave owning plantations were economically more productive than free farmers. After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.

Obviously slaves were individually much worse off than if they were free, and society as a whole suffered from the suppression of human capital. Had all those people been free for all that time, imagine what could have been accomplished besides growing more cotton. But for the slave-owner, there was never a point where abolition became economically advantageous, hence why slavery was ended at gunpoint.

Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.

Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.

What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.

The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".

This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.

Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?

I am quite hopeful. One benchmark that was passed only very recently was Levelized Full System Cost parity in Texas. That is, the total cost of generating electricity via renewables, importantly, including storage and infrastructure costs became equivalent to other options.

I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.

It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.

I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.

> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry

Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.

> belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous

On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.

My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.

> still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically...

not crazy especially as slavery was supplanted by debt, which is in a way fractional slavery (minus the chattel part ofc)

So solar energy falls from the sky, but what about the resources it takes to make the panels?

Even if global greenhouse gas emissions immediately and permanently stop, climate change won’t. We have many years of further warming ahead of us due to the greenhouse gases already dumped into the atmosphere.

It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.

Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.

Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.

So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.

If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.

What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.

With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.

Slavery was ended in the USA by the Civil War veterans.

It depends how you look at it

> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna

China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.

So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.

Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime

(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)

Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?

Which is funny because we've had an environmentally and economically optimal source of power since the 50s (nuclear) which we deliberately phased out due to panic cycles.

There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting.

Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.

This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.

There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.

There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?

We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.

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> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement.

I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).

At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).

"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".

HN is truly lost.

Is this a joke comment or do you not realize that people were treated like chattel slaves while working in the first factories?

> I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change.

I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.

Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.

Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]

So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).

We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].

It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.

0. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of...

Presumably we have dammed everything that made sense to (and some that didn't), so solar / wind will keep growing while hydro is unlikely to change (unless it drops).

Never seen this before and looks great.

How often does this get updated?

Don't start with a 5MW project. Start with a 10-20kW ground-mount project in your back yard. Then build a 100-200kW project before trying MW.

I bookmarked this thread because i'm very interested too. If AI takes all teh corporate jobs then I'm going to be a photon farmer. you can get land down in Brewster County Texas for about $1,500/acre but would need to find a spot close to a grid access point. There's some decent reddit discussions on this sort of thing.

> If ERCOT ("Texas") would get over their independant grid "benefits"

Currently, even though it pains me to say this, ERCOT has one of the most mature battery systems in the world.

Everything else is valid though.

Every time someone posts a imgur link on HN I get this as response:

    Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.

That would be around 30kwh per day so probably not, but you could get close.

Assuming you're in the US, new solar modules go for about $0.28/watt.

If you dump the entire $1k into just modules, that will get you about 3.5kW of panels. Which will probably hit your target on sunny days during the summer.

But that doesn't include inverters if you want to do a grid tie, or batteries if you don't, or wiring, or whatever you're going to mount the panels on.

Niagra falls doesn't run at full capacity because it takes away from the attraction of the falls themselves, and tourism is important there. They turn up capacity after hours, and the falls slow down.

Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam is currently at 23.6% of capacity. Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is currently at 29.7% of capacity.

Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.

It turns out that "releasing immense amounts of water downstream" can have side effects.

Looking at the data for lake that goes through the dam, it seems like they keep it at the same level. So it probably CAN make 7MW with more flow, but generally only flows at a state that puts out 2.

Limited water resource. In recent drought years, gas-fired power plants in California had to make up for reduced hydro generation.

Vogtle is probably producing the most electricity out of any generating plant in the US once you consider capacity factor.

They are used as dispatchable sources. Capture value by being able to provide enormous amounts of power when needed compared to the watershed flow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

I'm the other side of the pond, but

tesla isn't great value any more. For a while powerwalls were the shit And the powerwall three is nice, with direct DC charging as well as islanding.

But, only 13kwh still, and internet dependency, and very expensive.

I currently have enphase micro inverters and a power wall 2. It was the right mix at the time.

But, if you have the space, which I think you do, An insulated shed for a 19" rack, and choose any one of the many battery unit makers. Its about $200 per kwh now (in UK prices, I'm not sure what tarrifs are doing for you)

then get a frame for your solar (or build a barn and roof it with solar, its cheaper than 12mm plywood at the moment.)

Have micro inverters, they are more expensive, but solid state, less likely to catch fire, do MPPT better, and are not a single point of failure.

You'll need backup for when solar doesn't cover your daily needs, so either grid or some other power source.

How big of an install are you looking to do? I just did a ground mount install on my property. (4kw panels, 5kwh battery) If you are good with your hands, and can follow instructions then I would recommend you do the work your self. The actual installation of the panels and battery are close to plug n play. The cost of an electrician can easily double the project costs for small projects.

For the panels I did whatever was cheapest on signature solar. For batteries and inverter I did eco-worthy. (eBay for that, they run sales pretty often) in total is was $1000 for the panels (that included delivery) and around $1200 for the battery and inverter. If you have a truck then you might be able to find cheaper panels locally.

On YouTube check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He is a certified electrician and publishes part lists and plans that are easy to follow.

A few things that I've needed to deal with in my off grid setup:

I like the MidNite solar controllers.

LiFePO4 batteries are great, with a few caveats:

  - you must use batteries from the same batch, ie you can't upgrade capacity piecemeal, to avoid degrading the new ones  
  - cable lengths are important because even small differences in resistive losses between batteries can mean that one battery is doing more charging / discharging  
  - you can't charge below 0\*C, which I'm assuming could be a problem in New England

All you need is a solar charge controller and a battery, and optionally an inverter.

You dont need a company to do this for you, unless you want pay $$ to connect wires.

I've found lots of communities online on both reddit and facebook for solar DIY and there's some youtubers out there that talk about what you need for this and do reviews of different batteries/inverters/panels.

From what I've heard Tesla has a high cost/energy storage rate and you'd be better of going with something else (even if you have a tesla) but it would boil down to are you wanting to set this up yourself or hire a professional to do all the wiring.

If you are planning to get a Tesla car with PowerShare (it's slowly expanding to the Model Y and other vehicles) then you only really need one Powerwall 3, because the car when charged acts as ~7+ powerwalls worth of backup.

>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries,

>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?

Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over many years to not incur non-starter level costs.

You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.

One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway.

Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...

It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.

I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.

It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.

Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.

The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.

Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)

Biggest take away - 90 million acres in the US go to corn/ethanol production. 31 acres of corn for ethanol to match the energy production of just 1 acre of solar panels. Revenue could be 3-4x that of corn production. Get ready for rise of the photon farmers.

May the man run for office

That entire talk didn't once mention the phrase "energy density" which is the real reason we rely so heavily on hydrocarbons.

Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.

And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].

It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.

0. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324

There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids.

Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.

Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")

US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025

China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025

North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...

(no current oil commodity exposure)

Those offshore wind farms are getting completed mostly because they were so deep into development when Trump tried to cancel them, with a ton of sunk costs. So the companies were able to make the decision to go forward because the extra costs of delays and lawsuits were still cheaper than abandoning the build entirely.

Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.

Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.

Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.

Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.

Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.

It bothers me that you attribute this to Elon Musk. This has been obvious to everyone for 75 years or more. The lecturer in my freshman thermodynamics class mentioned it, 35 years ago. In 1999, NREL scientists writing in the journal Science under the title "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future" made the specific claim about 10000 square miles.

Meanwhile he is burning jet fuel to power is AI cluster.

A clusterfuck of priorities.