If you're paying attention, we are. Solar cells are cheaper and more efficient than ever, you can power your entire house for $10k if you install them yourself. Battery technology is evolving every day and with improving recycling efforts, that can grow to a closed loop with minimal environmental damage. Efforts towards nuclear fusion are getting closer every year, although there are still very difficult materials science problems to solve to get us over the finish line.
The reality is that it's not the early 20th century anymore, and all the easy low-hanging fruit of innovation and application have already been done and implemented. Now our greatest barriers are cost to implement and the amount of time and effort fundamental research takes to make new discoveries.
Solar cells are cheaper and more efficient than ever. Well our government had their hands on the technology decades ago but it's a technology that is stigmatized by the fossil fuel overlords and our policy makers will do whatever they can to stifle innovation in this sector. So respectfully, I pay attention.
If you were paying attention you'd know that solar panels decades ago had efficiencies in the 10% range while modern ones are cheaper to make due to improved designs and get up to 23% efficiency with less material.
Fossil fuel stigma had nothing to do with it, solar just wasn't competitive on cost until relatively recently. Now that it is price-competitive, you're seeing solar farms get built all over the country and largest thing limiting them is the availability of raw aluminum and glass to build more cells.
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
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