That…doesn’t seem to be relevant to the argument I made…
But to address it, it’s an article describing how India is planning to deploy a bunch of solar capacity. Great! Except that if previous countries’ experiences are any indication, doing so will probably either increase the cost of retail electricity in India beyond the spending power of the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants, or result in a very inconsistent, unreliable grid that tends to fail exactly when people need it to work most.
India does have some advantages in deploying solar that Germany and the US don’t have – it’s much closer to the equator in particular. Then again, Spain is quite sunny and they still have very expensive retail electricity prices following a huge ramp-up in their deployment of solar electricity generation.
Currently, to provide reliable electricity generation solar and wind require either:
- backup generation from nat gas or other fossil fuel
- ridiculously large overbuild
- huge amounts of batteries
which make them much more expensive. Overbuild and battery production entail a lot of embodied energy (the industrial processes for making aluminum, steel, and other raw materials use a lot of energy) most of which currently comes from fossil fuels, so increasing solar and wind capacity…also increases the use of fossil fuels.
Anyone who’s telling you “this is simple – just build more solar and wind!” is not taking the real-world problem of energy production seriously.
