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Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 703 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#oil#energy#solar#cheaper#sun#power#more#wind#spill#change

Discussion (31 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

acdha•about 2 hours ago
In addition to being cheaper, you never hear about a massive sun or wind spill and the prices never change due to events thousands of miles away.
ben_w•about 2 hours ago
Onion headlines aside*, we kinda do? This summer's European heatwave is due to emissions worldwide**; while the historical record has the early emissions from Europe, all the other inhabited continents have also contributed to it since then.

* https://theonion.com/solar-power-investment-skyrockets-upon-...

** There's also a big El Niño event, the Wikipedia page on the heatwave currently expressly denies that this contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaves

dyzone•about 2 hours ago
> Onion headlines aside

Well technically speaking crude oil is a form of solar energy. (Sun -> plants -> animals -> crude oil)

MikeNotThePope•about 2 hours ago
What energy sources do we have that don't ultimately derive from either solar of radioactive decay? Residual heat from object formation perhaps.
x______________•about 2 hours ago
Isn't solar derived from nuclear fusion?

Nukes for the win!

nisegami•about 2 hours ago
>There's also a big El Niño event, the Wikipedia page on the heatwave currently expressly denies that this contributed

But isn't that accurate? The ENSO is a specific phenomenon in the Pacific and it's not clear to me how that would impact the EU in such a direct manner.

roryirvine•2 minutes ago
Yes, the main effect of a strongly positive ENSO on Europe may be a reduction in polar vortex instability, resulting in a milder, wetter, and more storm-prone winter.

But given the remoteness of the Pacific and all the other sources of variation in European weather, it's a fairly weak signal with lots of uncertainty (and there's no clear signal at all for summer weather).

roenxi•about 1 hour ago
The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China. It just happens that the situation in China is pretty good because their military are the most competent in practice out of all the major players. At least so far.

> In addition to being cheaper...

It might even be cheaper, we're looking for the tipping point. But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. The reason the world runs on something like 80% fossil fuel is because solar has, so far, manifestly not been a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels.

If you ignore the fact that people would have to go without energy then sure, it'd be great. But the practical reality is the downsides of oil are much smaller than the downsides of not having cheap, accessible energy. Which is why the world persists in using coal and oil.

andsoitis•about 2 hours ago
Oil is used for a lot more than power generation.
Symbiote•about 2 hours ago
28% is used for petrochemicals and "other".

The rest is for energy, mostly for transport.

binyu•about 2 hours ago
Yep, that's one of the reasons it is called "green" energy. On top of renewability, the environmental impact of production is radically different from fossil fuels.
mhh__•about 2 hours ago
The prices do change because (many, at least) renewable projects are subsidised via CFD schemes and so on and atop of that are selling into a spot market that may (it varies) pay them more than what they offer into the market.

It's wonderful technology, the sun is god and so on, but we can't run everything on bursty renewables.

gertrunde•about 2 hours ago
Wind spill?

Like... A hurricane?

Sun spill?

Like... A coronal mass ejection?

sd9•about 2 hours ago
But hurricanes are going to happen regardless of whether you have a turbine
ekianjo•about 2 hours ago
good luck building solar without having any petrol or plastics derived from petrol in the supply chain
hdgvhicv•about 2 hours ago
About 5kG of polymers per kw. That’s about a gallon of oil if it all came from oil. Where I live a 1kW solar panel offsets 100 litres of oil in a car every year. Oil from a single full tank of petrol could produce enough energy to drive a car about 1 million miles over its lifetime.
savolai•about 2 hours ago
Also see: black and white or false dilemma fallacy
ben_w•about 2 hours ago
Oh no, turns out that even if we stop burning oil we still need 6% of it for plastics, clearly this means there's no environmental benefit to reducing how much we ship by 94%, and we can't possibly for example move the plastic production to where the oil comes from so what we ship isn't crude and oh look people are already genetically modifying bacteria to produce oils suitable for various of the huge range of things in the category "plastic", which is such a broad range of things that saying anything about the whole lot in one go is a bit like saying "eat more fruit" when you mean "you are short of vitamin C specifically", oh wait hang on a minute…
ThrowawayTestr•about 2 hours ago
It's a good thing we burn all these precious hydrocarbons, less microplastics in the environment.
epolanski•about 2 hours ago
Electricity cost is pegged to energy cost and wars happening on the other end of the planet influence it directly.

That includes renewables.

nisegami•about 2 hours ago
Maybe to the end consumer after being integrated into a grid, but the cost to the owner of installed solar/wind energy infrastructure should not change.
CrzyLngPwd•about 3 hours ago
Just one of the many unintended consequences of the USA and Israel attacking Iran.
hdgvhicv•about 2 hours ago
Unintended perhaps but not unpredictable. Distracting from the fact the US elected a paedo, twice, is worth it to the MAGAs.
stingraycharles•about 2 hours ago
It was actually predicted and advised against but the decision to go ahead was made anyway.
readthenotes1•about 2 hours ago
Unintended but not unforeseeable?

I think "acceptable" is a better adjective here, though people like to disassociate by using "collateral", like with the school of girls blown up the first day...

throw1234567891•about 3 hours ago
Business is business.