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58 results
Said and published
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Noah Smith
Korrent
Solar power combined with batteries has surpassed nuclear power as the superior energy technology for most uses.
Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.
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Elon Musk
x.com
The Sun is ~100% of solar system mass
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Jeffrey Zeldman
Bluesky
At the end of Frank Capra’s 1938 comedy “You Can’t Take it With You,” Jimmy Stewart quits his nepo baby bank job to experiment with solar power. Solar Power. 1938.
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Joey Hess
Mastodon
my rural neighbors have started asking me about solar and whole house batteries
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Joey Hess
Mastodon
The solar field thyme is thriving enough that I barely need to mow this area anymore
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Joey Hess
Mastodon
making best use of solar time - caramalized onions in instant pot while also programming - heat pump water heater cooling the air - thyme from solar field garden going into the quiche too - that's baking on solar power…
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Bruce Schneier
Korrent
AI coding agents pulling unknown code onto corporate networks will be exploited, and it will take the shape of a supply-chain attack.
This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Winds–style supply chain attacks.
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Terence Eden
Mastodon
RE: https://solar.bots.edent.tel/posts/6a9c618e-1a00-e6c2-9362-e5c45b7b1d34.json This is what the future looks like. Every home in the UK being self sufficient in electricity production and selling the excess back to…
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Kit Yates
x.com
Getting very excited about the solar eclipse on Wednesday evening given the clear forecast. Find out when and how much coverage you’ll see here:
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Kevin Kelly
x.com
Come visit our Burning Man art piece that we installed today. It's a mile-long line of solar powered LED strobes that create a streak of light moving at the speed of the Earth's rotation. You can feel your spin. At…
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Jasmine Sun
x.com
…useless for example: is the data center backlash just like the backlash to solar farms? @nicholas_bagley observed that both movements use classic NIMBY playbooks: Facebook groups, FOIA requests, packing city council.…
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Sanjay Bakshi
x.com
…if any, on government policy incentives, etc. There have been so many solar energy and wind energy bubbles in the past, and I have kept away from these companies. Am I being too…
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Ramez Naam
Korrent
Solar's future price should be predicted from how much has been built, not from how much time has passed.
We can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar…
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Ramez Naam
Korrent
Demand for electricity will rise to absorb far more solar than is currently considered feasible.
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
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Ramez Naam
Korrent
Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.
In short solar prices have dropped faster and lower than almost anyone has expected.
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Carlos Alexandro Becker
Mastodon
House will soon be solar-powered! 🌞
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Ethan Schoonover
GitHub
mutt-colors-solarized — mutt mail client color schemes
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Ramez Naam
Newsletter
New Record Low Solar Price in Abu Dhabi – Costs Plunging Faster Than Expected
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
The end state of the grid is not a fifth solar backed by spinning generation, but twice the demand in solar with days of storage behind it.
The logical end state of this displacement is not some hybrid grid with around 20% solar backed up by spinning generation, but a much more dynamic, versatile grid with around 200% solar generation and hours to days or…
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Ramez Naam
Changed their mind
After four more doublings of installed solar capacity, solar electricity will cost about 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
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Ethan Schoonover
GitHub
vim-colors-solarized — precision colorscheme for the vim text editor
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Ramez Naam
Korrent
Every doubling of the solar built worldwide has cut its price by 30 to 40 per cent, and that learning rate is why the price keeps falling.
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
There is almost no lower-impact use of low-value land than covering it with solar panels.
In summary, it is hard to imagine a lower impact use of low-value land than solar development.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Covering desert in solar panels is good for the desert: it shades the ground, holds moisture, and would pay for reversing desertification.
And the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just…
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Within a few years, the majority of newly broken-ground data centres will be mostly solar-powered.
So I think within a few years we'll probably see that like the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar
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Hannah Ritchie
Korrent
An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.
You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.
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Hannah Ritchie
Korrent
We worry about the land solar needs while ignoring how wastefully the world already uses its farmland.
While we fret over the amount of land needed for solar, we are often blind to how inefficiently we have used the world’s farmland.
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Ramez Naam
Newsletter
Solar doesn’t need a “breakthrough”. It’s a breakthrough on it’s own.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Solar's growth is not merely continuing but accelerating, and the rate of that acceleration is itself still rising.
It is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.
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Ethan Schoonover
GitHub
solarized — precision color scheme for multiple applications (terminal, vim, etc.) with both dark/light modes
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.
A number of commentators have consistently predicted that solar cost improvements will level out “this year” since about 1990, and yet if anything deployment, cost decline, and the learning rate have only improved.
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Dan Wang
Korrent
Doing the science first does not win the industry: America laid the scientific groundwork for solar and Chinese firms ended up making the cells.
Consider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
The binding constraint on the AI build-out is chips, not power, which is why not having a solar panel factory will never be on the critical path.
They're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand like the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right?
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Ramez Naam
Korrent
Average solar electricity prices in sunny parts of the world will fall to one or two cents per kwh by 2030 or 2035.
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Data centres will end up net suppliers of power to their communities, because a solar plant big enough to keep the machines running spills most of what it makes.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
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Andrew Chen
Liked
Solaris — Stanisław Lem
Classic scifi. Guy shows up on a research station above a planet with a strange (alive??) ocean
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Below about a thousand dollars a kilowatt of capital cost, the right way to run a plant is intermittently on raw solar with no batteries at all.
For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.
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Mr. Money Mustache
x.com
This is the best piece of news from 2025 in my opinion: Solar is already close to being the world's biggest energy source, with about 3 TW (= 3000 nuclear power plants!!) worth of installed capacity. This graph from…
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Sean Carroll
Korrent
Listening for alien radio is the wrong search: a probe that sits and waits beats a signal that passes you by, so an artifact in our solar system is likelier than a message.
This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.
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Ramez Naam
Newsletter
Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Orion was designed without reference to any mission it could actually fly.
It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.
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Ramez Naam
Newsletter
The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be the Most Disruptive Yet
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.
Cheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.
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Mark Lynas
Bluesky
Have you ever heard anyone say that there's not enough land for renewables? That solar farms will compromise food production? Bad idea! And 'Saving the World from Bad Ideas' is what we're about, so I was delighted to…
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Ramez Naam
Newsletter
Clean Energy Disruption – Video from South Africa
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
A solar panel is a manufactured object that produces wealth rather than consuming it, at a hundred times the rate of the best farmland.
Inert glass rectangles that, placed on the ground, print out wealth, at roughly 100x the rate of the best farm land.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at…
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Hannah Ritchie
Korrent
Chinese solar panels and batteries are cheap because of automation and a honed supply chain, not because of cheap labour.
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Nobody will finance new gas turbine factories, because paying one off takes twenty years of a market that solar and batteries will already have taken.
…we can produce gas turbines at a price that is relevant in a world where solar is already at its current price and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot…
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
The United Kingdom is the one rich industrial country that cannot run on solar alone, and it has to build wind at scale instead.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The…
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
The United States could localise the entire solar supply chain, from dirt to finished module, in two years or less if it started today.
And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Past a point it is cheaper to overbuild solar than to add batteries, because a battery kept for the rare bad day is barely used.
A battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
Every doubling of the solar built worldwide has cut its price by 30 to 40 per cent, and that learning rate is why the price keeps falling.
Per doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since 1970, but it’s only in the last few years that this price has become competitive with legacy electricity generation
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
China's advantage in solar manufacturing is neither cheap labour nor a friendlier business environment: the first is gone and the second was never true.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more…
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
With nearly free solar power, industrial processes optimised for efficiency should be redesigned to use far more power and run faster and cheaper instead.
You can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like…
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Casey Handmer
Korrent
A solar-powered data centre can cut its power draw a great deal while giving up very little compute, which is how it survives a run of bad weather.
actually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just…