Hacker News Reader

Comment by briansm | Hacker News Reader

For the same reason there were no solar panels prior to 1800, there was not an excess of societal energy to invent and produce them. Solar panels are not trees.

And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.

(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)

View on HN

There were no solar panels because we didn’t know how to build them until the 20th century. Today you can run the factories that make them on renewable energy without a problem.

You can do the whole process from mining and recycling to installation using solar power. Trucks, furnaces, cargo ships can all be electrified. The only reason we're not doing that today is fossil fuels are still cheaper.

I agree with a lot of what you say, except the bit about "cargo ships can all be electrified". It is more likely that they will use ammonia or hydrogen that are fully produced using only electricity (and some air/water).

For pragmatic reasons methanol is more probable: https://methanol.org/what-fuels-shipping

and that production of hydrogen (as a base for either ammonia or methanol production) will likely come via electrical cracking .. but it might also come as a result of atmospheric carbon sequestration in ultramafic rock: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-orange-hydrogen-western-austra...

I could try and explain 'energy return on energy invested' (EROEI) but what's the point? it won't make any difference.

I would guess you've been huffing anti-net-zero stuff which often relies on estimates from 15-20 years ago for the production costs of solar PV and chooses rainy Northern Europe for the insolation curves so as to get an EROEI number that they can trumpet as too low to make sense for generation.

But even then the numbers are positive, they just don't make good economic sense.

Today's numbers embarrass CCGT which is why these same fools will now tell you the problem isn't solar PV it's the batteries, the batteries are too expensive you see, so it's all pointless according to them. Weirdly the answer is always more Fossil Fuels. No matter what the question is, or what the facts suggest, they can assure you that somehow it turns out the answer was Fossil Fuels.

> EROEI

Modern PV typically has an EROEI of ~ 15-30, depending on tech, location, system lifetime, and accounting methodology.

From what I've read, coal might still beat that, but modern oil no longer does. Gas is generally also worse than PV in this regard.

Coal is however also very expensive, which is why e.g. the UK completely stopped using it for electricity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com