The only thing holding back a renewable revolution is politics.
Solar cells are cheap, and once installed, harvest free energy for decades with little maintenance. Battery technology is ready for solar on the grid too. Batteries based on sodium are available now. But even the lithium batteries are fantastic. Sure, batteries mean resource extraction and everything that comes with that, but what we extract is being made into durable goods that can be used over and over for decades, then recycled. Fossil fuels are perpetual resource extraction because the product is burned and destroyed.
One day, the number one source of lithium batteries will be old lithium batteries. This is already true with lead-acid car batteries.
Technology Connections Youtube channel just released a video that is the source for my comments. Bonus, the heat-pump guy get’s ‘mad as hell’ toward the end.
Battery technology is ready for solar on the grid too.
The science is absolutely there, but manufacturing definitely isn’t. Making PV panels is so cheap and solar power is so popular, we’ve had 581 hours of negative electricity costs in the Netherlands in 2025. That’s basically 6 hours a day through the whole summer. Ironically, solar panels becomming cheap and plentiful is making it unprofitable to create place more solar panels because their most productive time is actually costing money. We’re actually getting close to the point where connecting a solar panel will cost you money if you supply directly to the market (which most consumers don’t, but that just means someone else pays for the losses).
It’s honestly absurd, since placing another solar panel WILL help reduce demand on non-renewable sources off-peak as well, but how the market works is actively working against burning less fossil fuels. And of course, battery parks need some serious infrastructure, which you also can’t exactly just plop down.
Installing batteries is the perfect solution for that, but it’s very slow going. And even batteries won’t fix the summer/winter power production problem.
Infinitely far.
First, actual infinite power is impossible. It violates a bunch of the laws of nature. Not going to happen ever, at all.
Second, practically infinite power (meaning more power than we could ever use) is also out of reach. Solar/wind is super cheap, but you still need to build and maintain the PV/generators and that will always have a cost. Also, there’s infinitely much we could do with energy, so if energy gets cheaper we will just use more of it.
If energy was close to free, we’d just replace cargo ships with railguns or something crazy wasteful like that. We’d invest crazy amounts of energy in making things a little bit more comfortable.
Just look at the current AI craze, or the crypto craze. None of that is actually doing something really necessary, but it makes numbers go up on some billionaire’s charts and thus we waste ungodly amounts of energy into it.
If it wasn’t that way, and instead we’d keep our lifestyle and just use cleaner energy production to not destroy the planet, we wouldn’t have global warming at all right now. With the lifestyle of the 50s and the efficient tech from today, global warming wouldn’t exist.
But we like numbers going up and thus we burn more and more energy and having more energy available just means we burn more of it.
10-20 years same as 10-20 years ago
This reminds of the T1 diabetes cure. We’ve been 10 years away for as long as I remember. I’ve been a T1 diabetic for 30 almost years now
We just need to build some solar panels and batteries. Buuuuuuut, that would lower the share prices of the oil companies, so we can’t do that.
We are not anywhere close to having infinite power, and no one is working on this problem, since it would violate several laws of physics.
If you are wondering how close we are to having cheap power - we already have it. Electricity today is incredibly cheap.
Beyond this, you’re going to need some more precise metrics - how cheap do you want power to be, exactly?
In the United States, that’s a hundred years away. Coal and oil are king. Dear Leader has spoken.
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We’d have a lot more power available cheaply to consumers if all the Ai data centres were destroyed.
An absolutely disgusting waste of resources spent on making Ai girlfriends that can’t say no for socially inept neanderthals.
