this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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The U.S. solar industry expects to add a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of production capacity this year, up 53% on new capacity in 2022 and helped by investment incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, a report published on Thursday showed.

32 GW is a lot. The average thermal coal generating station in the US is 1GW and these stations have an average capacity of 50%. That means that this colar prodution capacity enables us to displace 64 coal stations during the daytime if consumption does not grow.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

eh... consumption will always grow, but probably half of those coal stations will close - presumably the owner/operators will be able to find new sources of income

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Energy consumption per capital was flat from 1970 to 2000, and has decreased from then.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T01.07#/?f=M&start=200001

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Crazy to look at that CO2 per capita chart and see that we're lower now than any time since the 40s at least.

About 25% down from 2008.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a layman in the subject but energy consumption tends to be diminishing on all fronts as technology becomes more efficient.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i was thinking more along the lines of data centers/server farms

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again, just a layman, but had a person in a thread tell me they ran an Opteron for some time and they noticed how warm the house was kept with that machine working.

After being put to rest, replaced by more modern machines, the eletric bill dropped, even when the heating was added in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Was that me?

If so I moved to low power i5s and run super cool and quiet without any loss of functionality or slowdowns. And my energy bill is much more pleasant now! A few generations of CPUs and it's worth just replacing old gear if you can, especially enterprise stuff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well isn't the world a small place!

Only critique I have is: you should have kept to AMD.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The mid-range at the time for AMD re: motherboard or CPU wasn't spectacular, and I wanted dual Intel GBE on the motherboard, otherwise I totally would have (my actual desktop machine is AMD)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just messing with you. I'm a self confessed AMD fanboy but I respect some will want to try other hardware or have specific wants or needs.

Nonetheless: AMD is the best!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Opterons were so bad though, and it's still difficult to get an Epyc machine for cheap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The designs for those have really improved too, also a lot of the stuff the internet has made obsolete was very energy intensive so when just looking at the whole picture numbers there can still be a trend down