alt Hacker NewsSolar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
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It's been cheaper than nuclear for a while now, it was only a matter of time.
Personally i'm waiting for the next iterations of Kesterite cells.
If we can get single cells to crack ~20% efficiency. With a tandem cell architecture, it's going to become the new standard overnight.
Durability of silicon cells or better, but orders of magnitude $ cheaper to produce, and without the need to use toxic agents as in perovskite cells.
We're movin' fast.
For over a decade we were stuck at ~12% efficiency. And in the last 4 years (probably with AI help) we've cracked 15% efficiency
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/chinese-researcher...
Few more years, and with a bit of luck, we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now.
As long as grid operators keep an eye on their inertia figures and fault current handling this is great news.
Synthetic inertia created by inverters can maintain grid frequency, but they cannot handle fault current. Without the ability to ride through disturbances, downstream protection equipment will fail to work correctly. If you hit a semiconductor with 10x its rated load, it needs to shut down immediately or it will be destroyed. The turbine at a nuclear or coal plant can take a serious beating for several cycles before it would be forced to trip offline. The machine is massive enough to absorb any damage without losing its overall functionality.
We need actual synchronous machines spinning with heavy masses. They don't need a carbon-emitting prime mover on the other side. They just need to be connected to the grid. They also need to be placed relatively close to the inverters (same plant/substation) or they won't provide the desired support.
This kind of makes the UK's double budget overrun Hinkley Point C new nuclear powerstation look even worse as a policy choice.
This was the best bet at the time when it was chosen, but it must be a good case of the sunken cost fallacy by now, given how long it's taken to build, and didn't follow an existing design*
As a risky policy choice, many distributed solar and wind farms with modern sodium-ion batteries would be a safer and more distributed (failure and weather resilient) modern choice.
*If the original design was defective, why are they using it in A and B?
I'd like to see more examples of (non-hydro) Gravitational Potential Energy Storage tried out. Very large containers full of sand, for example. If you have no mountains, a deep hole will do.
"Current levelized cost of storage ranges from $150-300 per MWh for established pumped-storage systems, while newer solid-mass gravity systems estimate costs of $200-400 per MWh. These figures are competitive with long-duration storage applications but remain higher than lithium-ion batteries for shorter-duration uses."
https://eureka.patsnap.com/report-gravitational-potential-en...
More stoked for when the same is said for storage.
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
Better in many ways: true clean energy like solar and wind are the only sources of power that truly allow individuals, communities and regions to be self-sufficient. That would flatten the distribution of power currently held by a few national or international power/energy providers - that's why it has been so ferociously fought by them via propaganda, lobbying, sabotage the past few decades.
It may sound absurd, but of all movies the 1990s Naked Gun 2 plot was already about fossil/nuclear conspiracy to withhold liberating, independent clean power from the people. Now we are just add an affordance infliction point that it doesn't make any more sense to not deploy it privately.
(and before the nitpickers nudge in, yes of course ideally it would run on open-source free software. But it's a reach goal, one that you never have with nuclear/fossil)
I think we’ll see a pivot from the right on solar soon, once they realize how cheap it is and how much money they can make. They’ll spin it as home-grown local jobs stuff but regardless it’s a win-win.
For more, see “Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time” with 464 comments from 9 days ago.
It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
Judging by the source data:
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?tem...
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear, the full calendar year 2025 slightly beat nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear. That's a lot of change in just 2.5 years.
Also, the graph shows the world needs more wind power as it counter cycles both solar and hydro supply.
my money is still on nuclear but i would be happy to be wrong
Poland is going all on solar. People are enthusiastic about generating their own power, government had to step in and curb the enthusiasm.
All hail Chinese overcapacity?
Is there any practical way for US individuals to invest in solar? With the anti-solar attitude from the government, is now a good time given that's where the world is obviously headed?
Great to read some good news for once. Solar in Aus is gong gang busters, as are home batteries. Awesome combo.
Is it? I keep hearing something like $30k. That might pay for itself over time, but it's hardly cheap.
Does anyone understand why you can't generally use solar when the power goes out? Is it just risk to line workers? (Couldn't you just auto-disconnect from the mains?) Is it just too variable to be useful enough on its own? Is my premise just wrong?
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According to HN you can totally do this and I'm just wrong.
The price coming down is great, more accessibility to more people. Have there been any significant breakthroughs in overall average efficiency/conversion? e.g. 30%+ Asking for my own selfish needs as I am in a place with reduce sunlight availability.
I suppose now it is possible to install a mirror in space, creating shade over countries that receive energy from the sun, and charge a commission for the use of the sun.
Solar power is nuclear!
Before you get angry, remember what the sun is....
I'm happy if we don't need more nuclear. We're already leaving the place in a sorry state, might as well not litter it with stuff that can kill you if you look at it too long...
It was bound to happen sooner or later. People tend to forgot nuclear is old technology. We went so hard on nuclear in 1960s because there was no alternative, nobody knew semiconductors would be so disruptive. Nuclear reactors are huge (to be efficient), still not completely solved (we are finding new methods of cooling every year) and require extensive regulations to save ourselves from human errors. Solar is the opposite. Build it, use it, throw it away etc. And your biggest problem is the environmental pollution and energy storage. Much better problems than trying to make nuclear safe. And even the energy storage problem is getting solved slowly by pumped hydro.
Why do I keep getting $20k quotes to install it then in the US. We seem to be doing something incorrectly here. The underlying hardware seems cheap (through independent research) but the labor and add in fees seem to be making this expensive. At sub $10k prices for the panels + batteries I would get it yesterday.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, the world crossed 3TW of cumulative deployed capacity earlier this year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
I'd rather focus on the fact that neither coal or gas seems to go own.
solar is not pilotable like nuclear though
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
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<subsidised, officially sanctioned by nearly every government, regulated to be easily deployed> technology overtaking <banned by several governments, mired in red tape, with a huge opposing lobby with deep pockets that's part of every group that should be supporting it> technology who would have thunk it.
Unregistered solar is huge in the developing world. In the Philippines, basically no one tells the utility they installed solar, because the net metering application is so expensive, comes with tons of red tape (read as opportunities for government officials to extract bribes), and only gives you billing credits anyway. So people just install batteries and automatic transfer switches. Some even disconnect from the grid completely, or never connect in the first place because it was too expensive to get the line installed. Automatic transfer to a generator is now very simple, and with LPG generators, extremely clean and low maintenance.
As I understand it, this is very common across much of the developing world now. So the tracking of how much solar energy there is in the world is almost certainly a lower bound on the reality.