Egregoros

Batteries and solar are two emerging technologies which have exactly this kind of behavior - which is why I'm very bullish on the future of these technologies.

I acknowledge the problems, and particularly that geothermal and nuclear are WAY BETTER from first principles. But the thing is, there's insane amounts of R&D going into solar and batteries, so they're evolving FAST, while nuclear and geothermal have relatively little R&D and so they're stuck in the doldrums (for now).

Which technologies win? The ones that can find a small boring niche and move up the chain from it.

Batteries -> Laptops and Cell Phones -> Cars -> Grid storage -> ???

It was really laptops and cell phones that gave batteries the beach-head to be able to start pushing out from.

Nuclear is an incredible technology, but it's very hard for it to evolve because it's not able to get this beach-head. Nuclear reactors are huge monstrosities which are developed by a few companies and there's very little competition and R&D compared to the cut-throat battery industry where finding a better chemistry is the difference between being King Shit and being Piece of Shit.

China and India have started deploying utility solar like mad and (for the first time ever) petroleum / coal generation has gone flat.

The logic IMO is that yes unreliable production sucks, yes batteries suck, but mining, transporting, and burning coal, then dealing with the issues from dirty smoke in the cities, sucks more.

And China IS building a shitload of nuclear capacity, but they're also putting in a shitload of solar because it's quick and cheap to install, and nuclear is the opposite of quick and cheap to install...

> The drop in Lithium prices correlates with China digging up more Lithium.

This is not price of lithium commodity, it's the price of battery capacity. As batteries become more dense, the price of capacity drops even if the price of lithium remains the same.

> China's markets aren't exactly natural

Oil is worse because a battery you buy once, oil you buy continuously as you use energy.

> No one wants to be dependent for their energy, least of all on China.

Everybody buys everything from China, basically nobody cares.

> As for the solar panels
> the trend is clearly slowing

Pic related.

What I think you're missing here is that the incentives really don't matter much anymore because the cells themselves have become insanely cheap. It's about 10ish cents a watt on Alibaba. 15 cents delivered in Europe. So India is probably doing it for 5 cents a watt if we're being honest.

Now for every watt installed, you get about 1000 watt-hours per year (France). In Africa you get 2000 watt-hours per year.

So math: If on average you're paying in 5 cents a watt, and your power cost (during sunny hours) is 5 cents per kwh, it takes a year to pay itself back. That is insanely good...

Now maybe power is worthless in the day, but it's worth something at night... Battery storage is about $50/Kwh. If you're time-shifting by one day, you need to store 1/365 of that 1000 watt-hours you're generating in the year so you can release it at night. So you need another 13 cents of batteries.

5 cents of panels + 13 cents of batteries to make power that is available any time day or night, as long as sun WAS available in that 24 hour period.

You do still need coal or natural gas for long cloudy periods, but if you're a grid operator, you'd be insane not to throw some panels in the mix to reduce your fuel burn during summer months. This is the logic by which India and China are building solar.