this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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batteries didn't make much sense in the past because where do you take the electricity from? combusting coal to generate electricity to charge your car is not much better than just combusting oil directly. now, we have solar. that changes everything.
You could have totally built small scale water and wind power a few decades ago. Also solar was already viable 15 years ago and would have been cheap af if it had been scaled up to "economy of scale" levels. For example Germanies solar capacity was already at 1/5th of todays level 15 years ago. That was without any huge subsidies and the panels and feed in returns were not great either. We could have easily been at todays level in terms of solar 10-15 years ago if the lobby for it was as powerful as the coal/gas/nuclear lobby.
Also, solar thermal generation was viable a hundred years ago, but nobody invested in it.
Sad this never got refined like it deserved for small scale.