Battery prices are collapsing and we are at an inflection point where electric vehicles will soon be more economical to purchase, drive and maintain for a much greater number of people. This is as inevitable as the phaseout of coal.
I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.
All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.
About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.
I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.
And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.
Unless you live in the US where tarrifs will keep that from being a reality.
Solar panels also seems to be on a tipping point
Oh it tipped a few years ago. It’s just still being implemented. There may be less startup to ramping up fossil fuel plants still, but solar is cheaper to build and operate
So I guess what kind of tipping point we’re talking about, I meant we’ll soon be drowning in cheap solar panels, it’s just as you said not yet at capacity.
Yeah, I was shopping for lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries maybe two years ago and was looking at spending over £1000 per battery. Now those batteries are not much over £100 and prices still seem to be falling.
What would one use lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries for? I’m not familiar with those
LiFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is heavier than traditional Lithium Ion batteries for the same amount of energy storage, but doesn’t degrade when discharged to zero the way traditional Lithium Ion does.
That looks like autocorrect or text-to-speech mangled ‘lithium iron phosphate’
Well, you know…sometimes you just need a vibrator that can go a continuous month between recharges…
People now about solar but I think most people don’t know that the 21st century will become dominated by solar really fast. The growth will be exponential and in the coming decade we’ll really see it happening at a ridiculous pace.
It’ll also be really cheap and complemented by cheap storage. It always sounds like it’s 50 years away but in reality electrification is coming in so fast and cheap where the developing world will leap frog fossil fuels.
If you’re a homeowner you can almost certainly buy solar in a manner where the monthly financing will be similar to what you save in monthly electric bills. So it’s a wash.
This year.
The difference is that electric bills will go up, while the financing terms stay the same.
I’m projecting inflation adjusted prices of energy to go down in the coming years as well as financing costs. The energy market is stabilising with the Ukraine war and central bank rates are also going down right now. Outlook is pretty good economically right but Covid and Ukraine really threw a wrench into the works and fucked up 4 years so far
Yeah i wouldn’t be surprised if the next 4 years saw natural gas and coal plants being torn down because they can’t be subsidized cheaper than solar.
5 words never written in sequence by a utility provider:
“We are lowering your rates”
There’s a bloke on Youtube who actually purveys good news on a regular basis if anyone’s interested: https://www.youtube.com/@itsSamBentley
I might be getting a new job which is better in every way. Only a couple people know about it.
Hey!! Congrats!!! That’s really nice!!! What will you do in this new job?
Reception, with some managerial responsibilities. There’s room to move up.
I have a Bachelor’s in Game Programming. The world doesn’t need another game programmer right now, but my experience managing projects came in handy.
I currently work in grocery, min wage, as a janitor/stocker.
My birthday. It’s tomorrow.
Happy birthday!
Well how about that. It’s also my birthday. Happy birthday, Leni
Thanks. Happy birthday to you too!
Wow! We have so much in common! I have a birthday too. 😁
Happy birthday!
Really? I bet it’s probably more than a year away though right?
I have plenty of birthdays that are more than a year away.
You’ve been spinning around a massive ball of fire at 74 thousand miles per hour for a year 🤘
I’m surprised it hasn’t made me motion sick yet. A new record.
Theory: alcohol inhibits the otherwise natural blocking of earth spinning induced motion sickness. If you drink enough, you can feel the world spinning and lose balance.
Imagine if it all suddenly stopped and we all got still-sickness.
If it suddenly stopped, we’d all be launched it various directions.
Grats Leni
Thanks
Happy birthday!
Thanks :)
I hope it goes great for you!!! 💖
Thanks
Happy cake (do we do cake on lemmy? Why not pie?) day.
Thank you <3
Happy Birthday!
Thanks <3
That’s wonderful news. Congrats!
Thanks
Well, in the northern hemisphere, we’ll start getting progressively more daylight in 6 days.
Oh hell yeah
Wait, already? I want dark. Me need dark.
Keep your blinds down then, but the rest of us praise the sun!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!
Night man, ahhEHHHahhhhh!!!
I only praise the man-made sun.
It’ll still continue to feel dark until early March so don’t worry.
Yea this is my first winter in the northern hemisphere, I was warned about the dark being unbearable, but it’s been pretty good so far…
It’s harder on the upswing for me. Maybe it’s because January and February seem to stretch on after the holidays, but I don’t really get tired of winter until later (luckily).
It depends how north are you
Absolutely, but unless you’re in Antarctica, it can get much more extreme in the North than South. Tierra del Fuego is south of Australia and South Africa, but it’s closer to the equator than the southern tip of Norway.
By like 2° latitude… But yeah… Nobody lives below Tierra del Fuego all year (scientists maybe?) but plenty of people live North of there (Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Finland etc.).
Source that there is a Finland?
Thank fuck. I hate the thing where the sunrise is at 10am, and sunset is at 2pm.
I can take the cold. I like seasons. I despise the short days.
I love it. For about 2 weeks. Then I just want to go to Spain until May.
Booooo!
Vampires hate this one weird trick
What, not being in highschool? That tends to put them off their feed, I hear. 🤢🙃
Daytime energy is soon going to be free in much of the world. The advances in green tech, especially solar and batteries, are real. Much faster progress than even the optimists were predicting a decade ago. The revolution is reaching a tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining and requires no state subsidies. I am not a tech utopian, and this alone will not save us. But there’s no denying it’s good news. It’s all happening far too late but it does look like humans are going to kick their fossil habit after all.
Inconvenient footnote: thank China.
Best I can do is more bitcoins
Optimistic of you to assume pricing is cost-plus not willingness-to-pay. US utilities (and their foreign counterparts) will only too gladly keep charging you
Agreed. In theory that problem can be dealt with by properly regulated competition.
Capitalism only encourages innovation when its profitable. Its a bit of a flaw.
It’s gotten so good that China might be restricting output to keep the prices high…
(their onshore wind, and pumped hydro storage, are also great success stories, as is the EV industry there)
Indeed. China is such a paradox. An absolute anathema in terms of culture and politics. It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little. And yet, and yet. Without China we would be royally screwed. They are pulling the weight of the green transition basically alone. So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
Tiananmen Square was not that long ago. There are lots of living people who would have seen their fellow students get crushed by tanks and rinsed down a drain.
That will keep a generation and their children quiet. Their children have also now seen how risings are punished via Hong Kong.
I don’t think it’s even possible to imagine what you would do having seen your government enact that kind of violence on your peers. So I certainly don’t judge.
In a way it’s even scarier than that. Most younger Chinese do not even know those things happened. I can confirm this incredible fact from personal experience. At this point “Tiananmen Square 1989” has more meaning to the average educated Westerner than it does over there. It has been scrubbed from history.
It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little.
This assumes that they have an alternative to authoritarianism that they could enact if they wanted. For some reason, the authorities don’t allow that. And the authorities also don’t like when people talk about it, so it’s difficult to discuss and convince others that authoritarianism is bad.
True but it’s not like China has never decided enough was enough and replaced their leadership by force
Yes sure but China has never been anything remotely like a Western democracy. It would be difficult to keep the lid on a billion people if they really wanted to live differently. Political culture runs deep.
If they want to defer to authority, they can just keep voting in the ruling party. Democracy doesn’t mean no choices.
Voting? Democratic elections are literally not a thing in China, at least not higher than the level of the village. There are no political parties other than the Communist Party. But for Western democracies I do agree. We have no excuses.
My later comment was misunderstood. If being ruled by strong Communist leaders is the “political culture” of China, then fine. Give them a choice every few years and they will keep selecting that.
But we all know that the “revolution” needs to maintained by not giving the people the choice. If given a choice, the people might be “fooled” by Western influence and select someone other than the Communists. So the Communists pick all the candidates and then let the people choose only between them.
The fact is that the “political culture” that supposedly backs authoritarianism would not survive free and open elections. The political culture being unwaveringly Communist is a sham and a lie.
Voting is absolutely meaningless in Xi’s China. But I gotta give it to them for their solar panel work. Too bad it’s all about to jump in price due to the idiotic tariffs.
Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism,
So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
You just did, according to .ml users, because ACkShuLly cHiNa iSnT aN AuThoRitArIaN CounTRy
Joke’s on them: not only authoritarian, but capitalist authoritarian.
Yes, but, we depend on fossil fuels for far more than just energy. We still get most of our plastics from them, and most of our fertilizer, without which we can’t feed most of the developed countries. And while renewables are great for stationary use, we still don’t have anything with the energy density of fossil fuels for cars, shipping, air travel, and cargo. And, whether anyone thinks it’s a good use or not, war is entirely, inefficiently, and intensely run on oil.
There are a lot of other issues entirely unrelated to power grid energy production we have to solve first, the most challenging being our own aggressive human nature. We’re a long way from kicking the oil habit.
The energy density of batteries just keeps increasing, for cars at least it’s now good enough. I agree completely about the rest but this was meant to be a happy thread! I agree with OP that we need to talk about good news too sometimes.
Fair point about positive things; I just think it’s important to not delude ourselves.
Completely agree. Self-delusion is such a temptation and the danger is real.
Is there a good place to ask about independent (non-grid-connected) solar for an otherwise grid-connected structure? I’d love to set something like this up, but can’t find any systems which don’t require wiring into the gird.
I’ve set up an off grid solar system out of necessity. Used to be an electrician so I know a good bit (but not everything by any means). What are your questions I can maybe point you in the right direction.
Based on your initial question, it depends on local zoning. You can likely legally grid tie a set up and have a battery backup. I think if you want to be legal I’d go that route.
If you want I think you could set up a completely separate system in a more sneaky fashion that is completely isolated from the grid / your existing house circuitry. But when grid tying (including into your house circuitry) you have to be pretty safe because that power can go upstream and feed the grid or the house when workers think the power is off, which is obviously very dangerous and could get you in a lot of trouble if it went wrong.
Why would you pass up on the free money of selling the power? You’re probably looking for a hybrid system if you just want to keep the lights on during a service outage. Or I guess you can just build an off grid system and wire it to a generator transfer switch if you want to power your house circuits but only during an outage.
Most half decent solar installers can help either way.
I bet the Solarpunk and homesteading / permaculture communities might have some ideas on this!
Best ask in a more specialized forum. Personally I rent so I have to take what I’m given.
This IS good news!
I hope I live to see a modular, upgradable, repairable laptop with a ridiculously ludicrous battery life. (Without it being powered by some sort of highly volatile fusion core or something Lol)
You wish, if we keep going towards everything has a battery power demand is only going to go up
Sure, but energy efficiency is always improving, distribution and storage are always improving. And the full electrification of transport (which is what you seem to be alluding to) is not going to happen overnight.
Thailand is set to legalise same sex marriage and Norway is set to ban ICE cars, both in 2025.
There’s probably a lot of these small wins happening around the world. Let’s keep an eye out for them so we don’t lose all our hope for a better future.
Norway is set to ban ICE cars
Newly registered ICE cars, I assume?
I’m not up to speed with it as I’m not Norwegian myself but I think that’s correct. They’re aiming to be ICE free in 2035.
It makes sense, why does anyone need them? We will run out of fossil fuels in the next 25-50 years. They are also less cost efficient.
We need them because most of us have to buy used ICE cars because of our financial situation.
If you really cared you would just be less poor.
Thanks for the insight into my finances, Elon. I’ll get to having kids soon too.
Or we don’t have a good way to conveniently charge them. This makes up a significant portion of users who would buy an EV. Dunno why everyone peddling EVs always conveniently ignores this.
Look, I think EVs are a fantastic idea, but if you can’t figure out the charging infrastructure, then it doesn’t make sense for many of us.
This is only new. They’re not stupid enough to kick off 2/3 of cars currently on the road.
But eventually EVs will go down in price or should like a lot of other things as they become more popular. They shouldn’t ban sale of used ICEs though. That wouldn’t be fair. And it would make ICEs worthless. I can’t afford an EV yet but no hope to one day. If a country band ICEs the logical thing would be for EVs to go down to be affordable.
They’ve been saying that for the past 25-50 years, there’s more fossil fuels to be had, they’re just increasingly more difficult to reach (until the permafrost melts…)
It’s good we’re shifting to renewables, but we could continue our bullshit for the foreseeable future.
It’s more about cost efficiency. We probably won’t see the end of fossil fuels in our lifetime. The reserves are finding more and more scarce though. Plus people have told me they use solar power at home and charge their EV.
why does anyone need them?
In some, especially rural, areas, the charger infrastructure probably isn’t there and public transit isn’t viable in all cases. I’m thinking of industries like farming, forestry, etc. That said, that’s probably a fairly tiny portion of overall ICE usage for normal vehicles (I’m assuming construction equipment, tractors, etc. aren’t included in this).
I think it might also be financially difficult in some cases where people really do need a car (thinking rural life again, here), but are living on a very tight budget. That could also potentially be handled with subsidies and such, but I don’t know how that would practically work.
Edit: I just noticed I replied to the wrong comment, sorry 😅
You’re thinking America, Norway is small enough you can go without charging for a good while and it has lots of small cities, you can have enough charge to go to some city to “refuel” without issue. Yeah it’ll not be fast, but you won’t need several full charges to go from one end of the country to another
2300 km from one tip to the other, shining a range of 500km (done models go over 600 some others just above 400, so seems reasonable middle ground) that would be just over 4 charges, but this drive is already going to take over 29 hours. One of these charges will be overnight, not causing issues for your travel and you can charge while you eat lunch, so it would take away 2 other charging sessions. That would leave with a single charge session unaccounted for. Honestly it seems pretty good
Personally I prefer Thailand to ban straight marriage.
I don’t want anyone to have to go through being unable to marry just because of the gender of their partner
What? Why?
You happily married?
no
I’m about to go to sleep
Good night sweet prince
Goddamn you DrSleepless, your name checks out, why can’t I fall asleep
Because you’re doomscrolling on your phone
Sameeee
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursids
The Ursid (URS) meteor activity begins annually around December 17 and runs for over a week, until the 25th or 26th.
people spilling their minds over astrology will be glad the mercury retrograde is going to be over for this year.
And then it’ll be back soon: https://youtu.be/SumDHcnCRuU (3:15 minute CGP Grey vid)
I hear crickets…
That usually means a working ecosystem in the area, so that’s still good.
Well this only good news for Russian bootlickers but the foundation’s of geopolitics becoming more and more true.
What does that mean?
I think russia is going down hard (20 jan being their sole hope to salvage their kleptocracy) and with it the evil influence in many parts of the world => good news.
I would recommend if you wish to sit down and read the book, it reads like a mad mans manifesto on how to take over europe and china but putin is using it as a playbook. It’s available on the internet archive in english to read. Everything over the past few years is going to their plan, and the instability of civility in the USA is apart of that. killing CEO’s and people being pushed to brink of using violence to send their message or push progress forward, bringing a domino effect of the US goverment under donlad trump revolting and causing a 2nd civil war. Eurpoe should not rely on the US for defence, and should focus on their own.
Ya, that’s quite clear.
But we’re waking up, I mean Europe, the Kremlin forgets the numerous times when we kicked their ass.
Lots of “normal” people also starts to understand that lots and lots of bad things are backed by russia (libya, iran, argentina, cuba, rise if the right wing in EU/USA, hate and division, electoral interference, the list goes on) whicb mean they are out in the open. Also the ruble has collapsed, the soviet arms stockpiles are running out and so forth, russia is going under.
Economy and way of life is going to get even worse for us here in the US.
Good job putting the round peg in the square hole!
I don’t get why this comment has triggered so many people. Lmao.
…the OP specified a positive… piece of news.
Why am I the guy telling you this? The dude two replies ago should’ve said something.
…I’m disappointed in everyone 😔
wait wait. you have a point.
this is an opportunity to buy low and…wait a second…I’m getting a report that the economy will never recover.
in better news, spend your money now because you’ll only get to use it as heat later!
That’s ok, they can downvote all they want, y’all will remember me when shit gets worse. lol
Extinction of mankind.
Hate to break it to you, but short of something sudden like our sun exploding, getting directly hit by a cosmic ray or giant asteroid, it’s incredibly unlikely.
We have reached a technological point where we could save ourselves from our own extinction, caused by us or not. It’ll almost certainly be a tiny fraction of today’s population though, but enough will survive to avoid extinction
That technology requires massive manufacturing capacity that requires civilization. When water and food become scarce from a changed climate, there goes that.
We won’t go extinct for a time, agreed. We’ll cling to our hardened structures and aging tech for as long as we can.
But humans thrived on easy mode. In a climate we evolved to thrive in. Without that, we’ll become subject to nature’s whims once again.
This is precisely why “we’re going to colonize Mars” is a hilarious pipedream. We couldn’t make a practically infinitely forgiving environment that automatically recycled our waste, water, and air work. We stressed it as hard as we could for as long as we could until it started pushing back, yet we only increased our attack.
A few peak humans growing potatoes on mars is a cute “yay humanity” moment. But you’ve met us. A colony of hundreds, or thousands, some born into what would inevitably be a highly class segregated system that demands their servitude, given the private profit egotists now in charge of such things, where anyone making a mistake or having had enough easily leading to boom everybody dead try again? Yeah, that’ll go swell.
Humans can do a lot of things that they aren’t.
The Yellowstone Caldera erupting would probably do it, too. Also, a sufficiently big meteor, a rogue planet, or black hole. All would are beyond our current level of technology to survive or avoid. Or a local supernova, although there are no known likely candidates so that one is less likely.
With meteors it isn’t if, it’s when. The question is whether or not we’ll be ready for it when it happens.
We’ll let it hit us as 2 superpowers argue and threaten one another over who gets the mineral extraction rights.
I guarantee it.
Technically the cosmos are moving in such a way that our entire galaxy could collide with another celestial body at any moment if it were moving at sufficient speed relative to us, and we might never see it coming because the speed of light is only so fast.
This, and space is huge, it’s really unlikely to get hit by anything. It will happen over infinite tescales, but I’m not as worried about it as I’m worried over another work email.
Oh well yeah obviously don’t worry about it. Literally unstoppable force lol, what would worrying do?
Is the Rumbling starting?
