The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
Seems likely. But I can't buy sodium ion today like I can LFP.
The chemistry definitely seems to be better than LFP long term, but higher manufacturing costs and low scale means it's just not as available.
CATL is predicting that they'll hit price parity for sodium against LFP this year, commercial scaling still needs to happen, though.
Meanwhile, manufacturers can pick up prismatic LFP from all sorts of places, at great prices (ex - https://www.18650batterystore.com/collections/lifepo4-prisma...)
I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
China exported 68GW of solar PV in March 2026, double the prior month and 14GW more than total solar PV capacity installed in Spain.
Chinese solar exports double in a month to hit record high amid energy crisis - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/chinese-solar-export... - April 23rd, 2026
https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
>...while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
And we shouldn't imply that this policy represents any sort of national consensus -- it's pure corruption plain and simple.
It's also sabotage of all domestic manufacturing.
The price of energy sets a floor on the price of all manufactured goods. By kneecapping the cheapest sources of energy, the regime kneecaps all domestic manufacturers.
China's aggressive buildout of cost effective energy production isn't because they're 'woke,' it's because it makes them more competitive. Every product they export at low prices is in part due to the their extremely cheap energy.
It's like the regime looked at the UK's collapsing manufacturing industry due to their high energy costs and said "I want that for us!"
Corruption that concentrates on one party whether that party is in or out of power, too.
I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
No, storage (and transmission) are, in fact, THE issue. They always were. Solar is cheap and easy to install. Balancing a net zero grid without storage and with the pitiful transmission we have now is simply not possible. See: california.
The entire CAISO is a power laundering scheme to allow california to have publicly have huge amounts of solar power that overproduces enormously (including strongly negative power prices for a good chink of day) and still import dirty base load power quietly.
If storage was simple to solve, it would be solved. Chemical storage simply doesn't exist at the required scale and we don't like to build the one thing that we could, right this second - pumped storage.
We are already massively overbuilding solar. We would be well serv d to stop building panels and start building pump storage and transmission lines to distribute the stuff we've already got, but nobody makes a political career announcing a new transmission line.
It is solved. Citations below.
When the sun sets, batteries rise: 24/7 solar in California - https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/17/when-the-sun-sets-bat... - February 17th, 2026
Natural gas use for electricity in California falls as solar generation rises - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704 - November 24th, 2025
California's solar and battery combo packs a transformational punch - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/californias-sola... - October 3rd, 2025
California solar curtailment down 12% on back of batteries - https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/22/california-solar-curt... - July 22nd, 2025 ("For the first five months of 2025, CAISO data showed solar electricity curtailment declined by 12% as a share of generation, falling from 13% to 11.5%, even as solar output grew 18% year over year. During this period, however, curtailment still rose 4.1% in absolute terms, with March showing a 28% increase, matching the prior year’s peak.")
Batteries Taking Charge of the California Grid - https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/ - May 6th, 2024
Batteries are scaling up faster than ever in the US, enabling record solar growth to continue and reducing fossil fuel use. - https://ember-energy.org/chapter/the-rise-of-batteries-plus-...
> In 2024, California and Nevada led the nation in solar power, becoming the first states to surpass 30% annual solar share, with California hitting 32% and Nevada 31% – the highest shares of any state. But the transition is uneven – while some states are surging ahead, others are just beginning to see significant growth.
> Batteries are essential for the rise of solar, allowing solar to meet growing demand and displacing gas and coal generation. Across the US, the growth of batteries is accelerating alongside solar, with 1 MW of storage being added for every 3 MW of solar added in 2024.
California Energy Storage System Survey - https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
Actually, the US uses more power during the day in the summer - there is a dropoff in the night for both summer and winter. Night time use is somewhat similar. [1]
Cooling takes more energy than warming, so the summer daytime use is higher. Summer = warm evenings. I'm from Indiana - it was almost always cooler at 10am than 7pm, even in the winter. It takes time to heat up or cool down. I'll also mention that nights and weekends use less power because business and industry tend to shut down during these times.
Which would somewhat logically mean that despite the efficiency being worse during winter, it isn't as much of a strain because power demands are less.
[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
Yeah, it's imperfect.
Does that mean that it is untenable?
Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
This gets complex quickly, because temperature matters too: cells are more efficient when they are cold. These effects interact and the results are sometimes surprising.
Many pure-numbers theoretical comparisons also make the assumption that you can consume all the power that the cells generate, which is not always the case. In an off-grid installation with a battery, for example, you might not be able to consume everything, depending on the month of the year. Practical example: my installation gets some of peak usage numbers in March/April, because that's when it's still cold and I use the power for heating. The cells are cold, I need the power, and there is some sunshine, all this combines. It's not obvious.
Curtailment and dump loads are pretty straightforward, though, so using all the power isn't as critical as people might imagine either.
It's better to overbuild the dc-to-ac ratio moderately and just accept that on a summer noon you'll be dumping or curtailing, and still get useful percentages in the winter. I'm in the fortunate position of having an essentially infinite dump load (water pumping and heating) that would effectively turn most of my solar into real usage, but even most people can preheat a hot water tank and things like that. With electric cars it's even better.
But they do generate zero power at night.
And people use less energy at night. Yes, they do need heating/cooling and a few other things at night, but the peak is during the day and in the evening.
This argument is almost closed at this point, with PV + batteries being quite price competitive. We're no longer in 2018.
Solution? Send large mirrors into space so it never stops shining.
https://www.reflectorbital.com/
That surely won't interfere with the ecosystem at all! /s
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
Great, so now not only is power production nondeterministic, your cars tank also is. It was too expensive and the algorithm decided to wait charging, so no spontaneous road trip for you, sorry.
As an electric car owner, this is absolutely the biggest non-problem ever. If you're planning a long journey, you push one button at some point over the preceeding week and it charges to full regardless of price.
I mean, assuming you don't zero your charge out when returning home, you could just take a few minutes to use a rapid charger part way through the journey...
The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Gas is faster to respond, coal, not so much.
From the Goog:
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2] The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6] If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-its-not-that-easy-to-start-operati...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-thermal-po...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-11/documents/ma...
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-minimum-time-required-by-s...
[5] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/inflexible-fossil-fuels/
[6] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
We can keep some of that coal-fired stuff around and use it periodically.
It's OK. Winter happens every year.
When the market needs that power, then the market will have to pay for it.
These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.
The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
The fossil fuel lobbies want us to believe it is a way bigger problem than it is.
The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.
Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.