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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Solar still has some huge problems when it comes to seasonality and day/night cycle. You either need massive battery build out or some other form of energy to handle base loads and/or offset when solar isn't producing enough.
Not saying solar isn't part of the future, but we literally can't just rely on solar.
Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.
I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!
You know what else I haven't heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won't hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.
You haven't heard of a weight battery because the weights need to weigh something close to a lake to be useful.
Companies come up every so often selling the idea and then people realise that the energy stored in the tower, mine, or whatever is about the same as a couple of EV batteries unless you have something the size of a lake.
You have to over build and you have to diversify. As many different types of generation as you can.
Nuclear probably has a role. However it doesn't fit well in a dynamic generation scenario. It doesn't like just sitting there waiting to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. It wants to be a full power all the time just due to economics.
If we could get tidal working, that would be superb. Regular, predictable and almost universal.
Solar panels have become more than ten times cheaper than they were a decade ago. They are easily able to gather half the energy of what they did a decade ago in the summer now in the winter.
So even in the winter solar is twice as price efficient.
Yes there is downtime but solar is a fast and cheap way to replace most electricity cost. Then the rest can be fixed with nuclear in 20 years. We need clean cheap energy now and we can mostly get it.
I'm not talking about price, I'm talking about generation.
I have solar panels, they are great. However, I get too much energy in the summer, not nearly enough in the winter, and no power at night. Since I'm on a grid that doesn't matter too much for me, but highlights some of the issues.
Even if I installed a battery, I'd end up with extra power in the summer and not enough in the winter. Which just highlights the discrepancy in production. Batteries obviously help solve this, but some mixture of wind/nuclear/other is needed.
This isn't a problem at City scales and beyond. You just can't buy a bunch of nazi batteries so there isn't a corp greasing politicians to build it.