Solar has possibilities, but manufacturers are just now reaching the point where the energy you get out of a solar panel equals the amount of energy it took to make it...it takes a huge amount of electricity to make a panel.

I found this about the cost and payback times of solar, seems to be more optimistic than what you think??? And I would presume the same goes for batteries, if they get made in Elon's factory in Nevada, powered by solar, then payback day is much sooner.. I did like their apology though of making a panel and using it in China, as the best case scenario. Hadn't really thought about what they are displacing in the equation, but of course that matters...

Environmental cost of solar panels
In this section we discuss the environmental ‘cost’ of solar panels and approach the topic of their carbon payback period.
This section can be categorised under many headings: Energy Amortisation, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Carbon Cost Payback and Energy Payback Period. All will be relevant in some form or another but for simplicity we will use the abbreviation LCA in this document.
There have been many studies in many forms that have been undertaken in regards to analysis of the LCA of solar photovoltaic panels. All concluding that Solar Panels do in fact pay for themselves in a relatively short period of time, both in carbon reductions, embodied energy and electricity, all redeemed well within their operational lifecycle. As the volume of PV units manufactured increases, the carbon cost of their production goes down, ever decreasing this carbon and energy 'payback' period.
It is very hard to ascertain the exact point in which this ‘payback’ period is reached as there are many varying factors that go into its accurate deliberation. These include manufacturing methods, country and locality of manufacturing, operating conditions, country and locality of installation and orientation of installation / installation method - to name but a few.
An example of how a solar panel would pay back its energy and carbon production cost extremely quickly, would be a French or German made panel (being manufactured with electricity generated from Nuclear power - low carbon) being installed in China, where the vast majority of energy is generated via coal or gas, which is high carbon. This would offset the carbon and energy cost taken to manufacture the panel initially, in a very short period of time. The opposite applies when a China made unit is installed in France.
Standard Solar Cell CO2 Production Cost Breakdown

A typical solar panel will save over 900kg of CO2 per year that results in a carbon payback period of ~ 1.6 years.

As solar panels have an expected life of 25 years, even in areas where the sun’s radiation is received at less than 550kWh per m2 such as the northern US, a typical solar panel takes around 6 years to pay back its energy cost.
A recent study by Vasilis M. Fthenakis, Hyung Chul Kim and Erik Alsema concluded that 1m2 of crystalline silicon took 250kWh of electricity to produce and under the measured conditions, produced in the region of 100kWh of electricity per year. This means that the payback period for the crystalline silicon PV panel tested, was roughly 2.5 years.
On a larger scale a study by Stanford University illustrated that the global PV industry is poised to pay off its energy debt between 2015 and 2020, resulting in a net energy benefit to society. This figure is largely due to the continued reduction of energy required to install and manufacture the solar PV systems themselves.

I would agree with you if it were just about anything but a traveling wave reactor. That's a very difficult concept to execute on.
https://ieer.org/...eactor-Sept20131.pdf

These are two of the more promising designs I'm aware of at the moment (courtesy of a girl I dated who used to work at B&W and now works at Lockheed... she geeks out over this stuff):
https://en.wikipedia.org/..._heavy-water_reactor (very elegant design, true passive safety, difficulty is in getting the thing to start and run consistently)
http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/...eVinci-Micro-Reactor (the DOD has taken an interest in this design which is promising because they don't have to take crap from the NRC)

So here are your options for renewables:
-wind (very close to its technological apogee)
-solar (both commercial mono-crystalline and polycrystalline silicon panels are close their theoretical maximums, most improvements to be made are on the BoS side of things, perovskite cells can theoretically lower panel costs but, again, it's really BoS that dominates at this junction)
-tidal (shockingly small resource base when you do the math, hostile operational environment)
-hydro (limited by geography, best resources already utilized)
-geothermal (largely underutilized but not without reason)
-biomass (shockingly small resource base again)
-efficiency initiatives (this seems to be subject to Jevons Paradox... all these years later it's alive and well)

Wind and solar are and will be the renewable behemoths. Generally speaking, grids struggle when more than ~10% of the installed base is wind due to intermittency. You can go further with solar as it's somewhat load-following but there's a catch: it's not viable everywhere. The areas in dark red are where the solar resource is high enough that PV is economically viable. The areas in orange are where solar provides a net CO2 reduction. The areas in yellow and whatever you want to call that other color (light spearmint?) are where replacing natural gas fired generation with solar actually increases your CO2 footprint and that's before accounting for any storage. The black dots are cities with a population of >1 million people. There's been a lot of talk about HVDC lines and continent-spanning "super grids" but, for all intents and purposes, transmission over ~500 miles is a non-starter economically. It can be (and is) done but that's more about interconnection and less about primary transmission. Even with very high voltages you start to get significant transmission losses and that has an affect on your net solar resource (such that those red areas become smaller).



... now if you were to go all solar in those dark red areas you have to address storage. Short of an absolute revolution in storage costs, this is a non-starter. Storage is currently economically viable for dealing with peak loads but that's a very long ways from using it to buffer the entire grid against daily, weekly, and seasonal ground-level insolation variability.

You can get around this to an extent with concentrated solar thermal technology (instead of photovoltaics, mirrors concentrate sunlight onto a thermal target which then powers a steam turbine, thermal mass can be used for energy storage) which isn't talked about a lot but only in limited areas within those dark red areas and that technology isn't without its own issues (more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and birds tend to think the mirrors are lakes causing them to fly near by which frequently leads to them getting roasted in mid-air).

In all probability, we will need nuclear power in the future if we wish to transition off of fossil fuels.

Aside to another one of your posts: last time I saw an EROEI calculation for polycrystalline solar panels the energy payback period was ~7 years and that was circa 2014.

Part of the problem with the cost of a modern LWR is that it's just too damn expensive. By a lot.

Gates was going to build his reactor in China, but the tariff mess has called it off for now, if I remember correctly.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

Most isn't good enough, though. Fukoshima was really, really bad PR. When you have an industry telling you that meltdowns are effectively possible, and that even if there's meltdown a radiation release could never happen....and then there's a meltdown followed by a massive radiation release, it's not a good look.

Yeah, I said PR disaster, not necessarily that it's more dangerous in general.

To paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." The media doesn't help much in this regard. Think fast: how many people were killed in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Incident? Answer at the bottom. How about how much radiation was released and is released on an ongoing basis? How about how many lives has nuclear energy saved? (This estimate says 1.6million) I'm not antagonizing you I'm just reinforcing the point you made: nuclear has a PR problem.



Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Incident fatalities: zero.

Which is why I PMEd you

Had a much longer reply that got erased so writing on the train

Basically you're ignoring the requirement to move bilateral trades to central clearing parties. There are new collateral requirements for credit and liquidity (looking old to new rules) that is approximately what the Fed and ECB have on their books i.e. instead of being able to buy treasuries the capital is sitting at CCPs or bilateral parties with even higher requirements or being used to increase capital ratio. Requirements must be meant with tier 1 i.e. cash and certain sovereigns (disconnect may be we use tier 1 differently). Also don't forget capital ratios just a higher than back in the day. Deposit (especially retail) cash is sticky. Best way to get deposit cash is raise deposit rates especially term for retail. IOER used to be top of target Fed Funds range then 5 bips under now 10 under. (Also I think they want bullets for when FB and TSLA go into BK)