– Given that solar energy is less hazardous and renewable, why aren’t more industries and nations fully embracing it?
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Electric Distribution engineer here.
1) Solar doesn’t produce enough energy. Requires a lot of land to produce small amounts of power relative to the alternatives.
2) Only produces energy when the sun is out. Best case scenario around 10am -4pm. So you need to supplement outside those times. Also doesn’t work for cloudy, dark geographies or countries with little land mass like Japan. 3) Solar doesn’t produce any fault duty. Because there is no inertia like from rotating machines, it doesn’t produce high fault currents, which makes detecting faults difficult. We are currently working on this problem with more complicated protection detection. The solution to renewable energy sources Is diversity and nuclear. Use solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear.
It’s not reliable, available 24/7, or easy to scale.
Building another generator at the powerplant is a lot quicker and cheaper than manufacturing and finding a place to install vast solar arrays.
Solar panels don’t work at all at night and only generate feeble power in the dead of winter so you need solutions to deal with demand when solar capacity isn’t available.
Solar can be a great supplement to the grid during peak generation and usage in the summer, but it can’t replace the grid so nations are hesitant to spend tons of money on it.
For one, they are absolutely moving to embrace solar about as fast as you can:
“The amount of renewable energy capacity added to energy systems around the world grew by 50% in 2023, reaching almost 510 gigawatts (GW), with solar PV accounting for three-quarters of additions worldwide, according to [Renewables 2023](https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2023), the latest edition of the IEA’s annual market report on the sector.”
Given limited money and team capacity to update energy generation capacity and even to build new solar panels, this is pretty remarkable growth.
The second point though is as u/Lithuim said — there are limits to what solar power can do for you, and you need to build basically gigantic batteries to store solar power generated during peak daylight in order to provide power at night and on cloudy days. This is definitely happening as well, but these are massive projects that take a long time to plan. This [report by Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/california-set-solar-storage-surge-zonal-grid-plan-2024-04-25/) gives a sense of the complexity, and also the extent to which many places (in this case California) are moving forward to upgrade the grid and create the storage capacity.
Other people have given you excellent answers about why solar is not ideal for 24/7 on-demand energy, but also battery technology needs to move forward as well. We have made major strides but we’re not quite there yet.
One interesting thing power authorities in some places do is give subsidies to people who install batteries in their own private homes in exchange for being allowed to draw on that power as needed during high-use times. Basically a big decentralized energy storage system, which is pretty cool.
Out of all of those answers, nobody discussed the political reasons?!?! There is a lot of investment and nostalgia in old energy. So the people with those investments don’t want to get behind new techniques. And they’ve convinced politicians and their workers that it out wouldn’t be a good idea either. So subsidies took a long time to switch to new technology. Trump touted coal jobs repeatedly, for example.
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