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Solar Panels Are Now Producing So Much Power That They’re Leaving Nuclear Plants in the Dust: "Solar is now the engine of the power transition." (futurism.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 38 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Batteries for grid storage also don't need to be compact or lightweight. High voltage infrastructure already has a lot of space where fossil fuel power plants used to be in formerly heavily industrialised places in Europe, we can make batteries the size of villages and not care about land use…

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Not enough to reduce the benefits to zero and that's all we need. As improvements come in you can upgrade the batteries over time and get better and better margins. But the system is already good enough for deployment.

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