<story><title>Colorado &apos;solar garden&apos; is a farm under solar panels</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/11/14/1054942590/solar-energy-colorado-garden-farm-land</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glogla</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen a lot of suggestions that solar can be used as the only energy source for humanity, that we don&amp;#x27;t need anything else, just build more solar!&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not realistic. Of course, the limitations that solar has are very much solvable, and having solar is better than not having it. Solar is important, and it is our future.&lt;p&gt;But the solutions to solar&amp;#x27;s limitations seem to be in their infancy (new types of storage), hard to scale (battery storage), not really helpful (just build more coal and gas peakers!) or not considered at all. Which does not inspire confidence.</text></item><item><author>cedilla</author><text>Solar is hardly over-hyped. It has always over-delivered since the first panels were built in the 19th century. No one predicted such a success and so incredibly low prices even 20 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Could you explain what you mean by &amp;quot;hyped in a marginalist way&amp;quot;?</text></item><item><author>Ericson2314</author><text>The key part is:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient.&lt;p&gt;Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way, but polyculture has always been a good idea :).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colechristensen</author><text>You see this quite a lot.  There does come a point where adding more solar … when a certain percentage of your production is already solar … there comes a point where more solar is a whole lot more expensive and less reasonable.&lt;p&gt;But that’s really more of a “80% of our power is solar” problem and the US isn’t even at 3%. The percentage of usage which could be handled by solar is usually far underestimated.&lt;p&gt;We don’t need to care about limitations of solar for a long long time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Colorado &apos;solar garden&apos; is a farm under solar panels</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/11/14/1054942590/solar-energy-colorado-garden-farm-land</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glogla</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen a lot of suggestions that solar can be used as the only energy source for humanity, that we don&amp;#x27;t need anything else, just build more solar!&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not realistic. Of course, the limitations that solar has are very much solvable, and having solar is better than not having it. Solar is important, and it is our future.&lt;p&gt;But the solutions to solar&amp;#x27;s limitations seem to be in their infancy (new types of storage), hard to scale (battery storage), not really helpful (just build more coal and gas peakers!) or not considered at all. Which does not inspire confidence.</text></item><item><author>cedilla</author><text>Solar is hardly over-hyped. It has always over-delivered since the first panels were built in the 19th century. No one predicted such a success and so incredibly low prices even 20 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Could you explain what you mean by &amp;quot;hyped in a marginalist way&amp;quot;?</text></item><item><author>Ericson2314</author><text>The key part is:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient.&lt;p&gt;Solar panels are still way over hyped in a stupid marginalist way, but polyculture has always been a good idea :).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Yes, you could run a civilization entirely on solar if you had a robust storage, conversion and distribution system.&lt;p&gt;After all, the entire fossil fuel reserves of planet Earth were generated over time by photosynthesis, i.e. the solar-powered capture of atmospheric carbon and its reduction to the hydrocarbon state from the carbon dioxide state.&lt;p&gt;The problem is the scale of the effort needed to replace current generation with solar generatioin.  Practically, it would take decades and a vast amount of work.  However, there are no technological barriers, and if the world had exhausted its fossil fuel reserves in say, 1970 then we&amp;#x27;d already have much of the solar infrastructure in place.&lt;p&gt;As far as storage solutions, you can find dozens of strategies.  My favorite is using solar energy to capture carbon for carbon fiber building materials, &amp;#x27;aerochemical&amp;#x27; products (as opposed to petrochemical) for industrial needs (dyes, solvents, etc.) and of course RP1 jet&amp;#x2F;rocket production.  Clearly such an approach will be needed for interplanetary travel as well (Mars seems to have enough CO2 and H2O to make this viable).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not surprising that people are so poorly informed, however, as the fossil fuel sector runs massive propaganda operations targeting childhood education onwards.</text></comment>