Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
sOcIaLiSM!!!
And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.
EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.
And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.
To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.
Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.
This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
There also was a project car from the Nordics I think. Can't recall the name though.
Main problem is the large amount of energy a car needs vs what kind of surface area you have and efficiency we get.
An ideal (100% effiwncy) solar cell of 5m² would still need 20 hours to charge a 100kWh battery. And we are way off on area an efficiency in reality.
Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.
* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo
Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
More importantly, seems they stopped manufacture it because they made a new version, that was supposed to be available in 2025, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere.
> However, in January 2023 Lightyear announced that it was halting production of the 0 model, redirecting their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2; Atlas Technologies B.V., the subsidiary responsible for the manufacture of the Lightyear 0, would be allowed to go bankrupt. As of 2023, the replacement, Lightyear 2, is slated to be US$40,000 and available in both Europe and North America, and to start production in 2025.
This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...
https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...
A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.
And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/tayavo/what_happen...
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.
The question is: how early do you retire existing thermal power plant?
Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.
There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.[1] https://uk.eragroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Global_sy...
Addendum: please don't downvote @red75prime for bringing a fact to a fact based discussion.
Solar includes energy storage - be that thermal, battery, hydro, etc.
So, the ratio of solar, wind and hydro would be different under a 100% green energy scenario for them.
They often have grid interconnects to countries where solar does produce a lot, too.
A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?
One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.
-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
Edit for downvotes, check https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... winter data and navigate through countries and tell me how sun's always shining in EU in winter and what capacity factor it can get in certain timeframes
For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.
Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.
At a large enough scale everything gets different.
Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.
Sounds like a fair system.
> Sounds like a fair system.
Yes, people voted for tax credits for solar/renewables. It is a fair system. You know what isn't a fair system? Fossil fuel externalities causing childhood asthma and rising sea levels requiring rebuilding coastal infrastructure globally.
Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.
EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage
Unlike pumped storage and batteries, Power2gas has poor round trip efficiency (40%) but unlike them gas is a very cost effective way to store large amounts of energy for long periods of time.
The ironic thing is that even if we produced all our power in this inefficient way and not just 4% it would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power.
Until natural gas extraction is taxed or banned, though, power2gas probably wont be cost effective. Natural gas is too cheap even with all the wars.
I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).
A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.
Two future developments might be especially useful: 1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.
2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)
Electric machinery is good but crazy expensive, esp in farming sector. Eastern EU still buys bellorusian tractors because of their price...
PV is already sufficiently cheap, the problem is new units start competing with existing units so gains are getting smaller unless you have lots of hydro or bess
Agree about huge sums being spent on fossils, it's a strong grip and getting off isnt cheap either becaus of necessary grid upgrades
My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable.
To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as well as well functioning global system, but that is not the reality of the 3rd world. And can be achieved much cheaper/simpler than a well-working global system.
Sort of like Africa leapfrogging land lines and going directly to cell phones.
Electric machinary does not have to be crazy expensive. As electric cars do not need to be crazy expensive, that is the market the west is willingly leaving to China/rest of the world. (Just go to China/Asia and see cheap electric cars. For locals, the electric is the cheapest option.)
Re: PV is already sufficiently cheap: For 1st world, and for the current applications. Bringing the battery costs down would enable much wider use of solar.
Last year I have been to remote parts of Indonesia. Almost all local transport was by small boats, with japanese ICE engines. The availability (logistics of getting the fuel to small remote islands) and cost of fuel were quite limiting. If each village/homestead had their PV farm for charging their boats, their life would be transformed.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
We’re still producing 80% of our energy from fossil fuels and that share is basically unchanged for 30 years.
The largest renewable share is hydropower, not solar.
The hype for volatile renewables on Hackernews is reallt tiresome, but I’m not surprised that the article source posted here is from a German government-funded broadcaster.
In Germany, shilling for renewables is basically part of the state propaganda.
Btw, Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants according to the official database called Marktstammdatenregister.
The energy transition in Germany is not working. Our electricity generation is neither cheap nor clean and national electricity generation has dropped by 20% since 2018.
Yet people can’t stop posting this nonsense.
Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.
They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
No, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.
Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.
Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.
The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.
If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.
The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?
You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.
What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.
Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.
I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
Isn't it insane?