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Comment on Solar is winning the energy race - The world’s cheapest power source is scaling at warp speed, pushing coal, gas and nuclear aside

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protist@retrofed.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I disagree. Here in Texas, for example, even while politicians push new fossil fuel investments, property owners and private solar companies are deploying small and medium sized photovoltaic projects all over the state. Solar is a higher percentage of our total generation mix every year, 10% of the total last year (<1% 5 years ago), and its growth is dramatically outpacing that of fossil fuels. You won’t see headlines about this, but the market forces are real

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Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Howdy, fellow Texan. Yeah, even we have realized fossil fuels are kinda a stupid way to power things. It doesn’t help that ERCOT is a shitshow.

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irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Yeah, but most of the data centers recently brought online to feed the LLM/"AI” bubble have triggered a bunch of retired coal plants to be restarted as well as old “dirty” nuclear plant that generate fissile-material for the new nuclear weapons Trump ordered built and other nuclear waste that we already dont have anywhere to store longterm. Part of the excuse being that the demand of these centers is too volatile for green energy. Plus Musk and Trump killing off the programs to build a network of car charging stations mean electric car production for the US market has been drastically cut despite gains in other countries. And cutting the incentives for heat pumps and replacing natural gas furnaces and water heaters has reduced the boom that heat pumps were having as well as are having elsewhere.

And the general public believes that natural gas in homes and gasoline in cars is cheaper than electric although that is not true, it’s only that

Anyway, more “dirty” energy sources are in use than a few years ago, do any gains in clean energy have been outpaced significantly by increases in use of dirty energy in the US, though that isn’t the case in many other countries like China and many EU countries without such large tax subsidies for the general public to consume fossil fuels more cheaply out of pocket.

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