I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
Isn't it insane?
Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected
The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average.
and discussion: Maximising time in the sun: how to maintain and repair solar panels to make them last (2026) - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maxim...
This is more about the lifetime of many PV panels in Australia (temps to 45 C so far) not specifically about PV panels with many hours at > 50 C.
Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
sOcIaLiSM!!!
And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.
EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
The "west" is not a single place and I hate that term, because it contains that "we against them" narrative, which is pushed on us from many directions in recent years. France, Germany or the USA all have a very different energy strategy, shaped by the availability of resources and geopolitics.
But for the average Joe, the situation across the globe and also in the "west" is not so different from what was described in other commments about Pakistan: People install solar on their rooftop, backyards, balconies etc. because it is dirt cheap now and amortises in a reasonable amount of time.
> EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
I can't speak for all countries in the EU, but at least in Germany, it's already quite easy and became even easier in recent years, e.g. private solar installations are exempt from various taxes.
The effort and money put into renewable energy in the EU is significant. In Germany around 60% of energy now comes from renewable energy [1] (Pakistan for comparison [2]), which was unthinkable 15 years ago. I remember quite well, that the fear mongers foretold, that we never will exceed 20% renewables or if we did, that the grid no longer will be reliable.
That said, you're right that the EU could and should do more. It feels like we're doing the "Energiewende" with one arm tied to the back. Unfortunately, there are many groups working against this goal by influencing the public opinion and it will stay like that for the foreseeable future.
[1] : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...
[2] : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-car...
So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power.
All 3 differences are the same effect, really.
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
Solar energy per capita / income per capita. What results do you get?
The fact that income is so high in America but solar panels are not ubiquitous everywhere.
Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.
And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.
To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.
Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.
This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.
https://aptera.us/first-vehicle-off-validation-line/
I think it is quite interesting, because it also tries to be maximal efficient, which increases the "reach" that the panels provide.
Don't get me wrong, this is a enthusiast car, but I think the economics could actually work for a small city car. Currently here in Europe, buying a electric car makes sense for home owners, which can charge their vehicle for cheap at home (especially if you PV). But a lot of people living in cities don't have a cheap charging spot. A car with solar panels, which gains a few percents of charge each day (instead of losing some), e.g. enough for the daily commute to work, may be interesting for such people.
I would love to see a ultra cheap take on this. Maybe an electric tuktuk like someone else suggested, with some solar panels slapped on it.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…
With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.
Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)
To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…
I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.
Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.
* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo
Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
New options do appear on the market like the new toyota prius with solar panel, but if you look at it you will see that they didn't even try to maximize the solar panel size. Still it gets 2 km extra range in bad conditions. Triple that and you have 6 km, in real conditions. If you use your car every other day, you will never charge it, ever. If you get average or above sun, you can drive it daily and not charge it ever. A big problem if you sell oil.
The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control. Nobody with big money is interested in that.
To understand who controls your life, see all the draconian measures taken against electric scooters: cheap, not poluting, democratic, don't need a lot of space and so on. Everyone with money said: we can't allow that. Write defamatory articles in the media they control, pass laws against it and so on.
It's not that I totally disagree with this - there is some truth to it. But it has no bearing at all on the question "can I put the panels on the car instead?" Which has been debunked in this thread and elsewhere many, many times.
The counterargument to what you say is that Solar is in fact booming. It is coming - oil money can slow it, but not stop it. They have more success in some countries than others. It's not a coincidence that China, which course desires energy independence but doesn't have access to a lot of oil, is leading the way. Sorry USA, you're laggards now.
But solar + battery is on an exponential ramp-up and getting big now. Each shock like the current Hormoz idiocy makes the case for it even more to the rest of the world. It's coming, fast.
Just, it's not useful on car roofs. That's a poor choice of panel location.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
The cost of solar panels is already low, that's why it's booming. This cost isn't the main constraint any more.
Panels on a vehicle have stronger requirements for low weight, and vibration tolerance than those on a fixed structure. They contribute to the complexity of the vehicle's power systems. They have to be designed with vehicle aerodynamics in mind.
And of course the limited surface area means that you do all of that, for a component that's it's barely able to keep the vehicles' aircon running. The physics of that will remain the same. Even of the total costs are low (and factors such as the vehicle weighing more are an unavoidable cost), the benefits are lower.
At any price point, including free solar panels, there are good arguments to put the panels on a fixed structure instead.
So maybe it will happen when we have run out of non-moving surfaces to put the panels on. i.e. don't hold your breath.
There also was a project car from the Nordics I think. Can't recall the name though.
Main problem is the large amount of energy a car needs vs what kind of surface area you have and efficiency we get.
An ideal (100% effiwncy) solar cell of 5m² would still need 20 hours to charge a 100kWh battery. And we are way off on area an efficiency in reality.
Yes, Aptera does not have a shipping product, and if they ship the current design it might not have a large market for it. The have been promising delivery for a long time now, so it certainly looks a lot like vapourware.
More importantly, seems they stopped manufacture it because they made a new version, that was supposed to be available in 2025, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere.
> However, in January 2023 Lightyear announced that it was halting production of the 0 model, redirecting their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2; Atlas Technologies B.V., the subsidiary responsible for the manufacture of the Lightyear 0, would be allowed to go bankrupt. As of 2023, the replacement, Lightyear 2, is slated to be US$40,000 and available in both Europe and North America, and to start production in 2025.
This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...
https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L1_zvqg73Q&t=590s
A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.
And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/tayavo/what_happen...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456963
Have a look at this, which is a (semi) serious hacker attempt to make it a bit more practical.
https://www.dartsolar.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...
He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.
Battery backed wind and solar farms work for high rises and for the suburbs (see, for example: South Australia).
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.
With-holding permits is stupid, as are bans on new deployments, but neither are subsidies. You can cut subsidies to zero and at the same time give out all the permits people requests.
The question is: how early do you retire existing thermal power plant?
Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.
There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.
He is going to pay them $1B to drop their plans: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/23/g-s1-114868/trump-totalenergi...
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.[1] https://uk.eragroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Global_sy...
Addendum: please don't downvote @red75prime for bringing a fact to a fact based discussion.
Solar includes energy storage - be that thermal, battery, hydro, etc.
So, the ratio of solar, wind and hydro would be different under a 100% green energy scenario for them.
They often have grid interconnects to countries where solar does produce a lot, too.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?
One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.
-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
I am suspecting the same. Thanks for the reply, not sure why my comment seems to have ruffled some feathers...
Edit for downvotes, check https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... winter data and navigate through countries and tell me how sun's always shining in EU in winter and what capacity factor it can get in certain timeframes
For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.
Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.
At a large enough scale everything gets different.
Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.
Sounds like a fair system.
> Sounds like a fair system.
Yes, people voted for tax credits for solar/renewables. It is a fair system. You know what isn't a fair system? Fossil fuel externalities causing childhood asthma and rising sea levels requiring rebuilding coastal infrastructure globally.
Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.
EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage
I'd guess batteries are also at that stage.
Googling it seems that is correct eg:
> In 2017, U.S. grid storage developers promised they could deliver 35 gigawatts by 2025. They beat their target and made batteries a key power-sector player.
> That goal sounded improbable even to some who believed that storage was on a growth trajectory. A smattering of independent developers and utilities had managed to install just 500 megawatts of batteries nationwide, equivalent to one good-size gas-fired power plant. Building 35 gigawatts would entail 70-fold growth in just eight years.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/grid-sto...
Unlike pumped storage and batteries, Power2gas has poor round trip efficiency (40%) but unlike them gas is a very cost effective way to store large amounts of energy for long periods of time.
The ironic thing is that even if we produced all our power in this inefficient way and not just 4% it would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power.
Until natural gas extraction is taxed or banned, though, power2gas probably wont be cost effective. Natural gas is too cheap even with all the wars.
I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).
A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.
Two future developments might be especially useful: 1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.
2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)
Electric machinery is good but crazy expensive, esp in farming sector. Eastern EU still buys bellorusian tractors because of their price...
PV is already sufficiently cheap, the problem is new units start competing with existing units so gains are getting smaller unless you have lots of hydro or bess
Agree about huge sums being spent on fossils, it's a strong grip and getting off isnt cheap either becaus of necessary grid upgrades
My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable.
To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as well as well functioning global system, but that is not the reality of the 3rd world. And can be achieved much cheaper/simpler than a well-working global system.
Sort of like Africa leapfrogging land lines and going directly to cell phones.
Electric machinary does not have to be crazy expensive. As electric cars do not need to be crazy expensive, that is the market the west is willingly leaving to China/rest of the world. (Just go to China/Asia and see cheap electric cars. For locals, the electric is the cheapest option.)
Re: PV is already sufficiently cheap: For 1st world, and for the current applications. Bringing the battery costs down would enable much wider use of solar.
Last year I have been to remote parts of Indonesia. Almost all local transport was by small boats, with japanese ICE engines. The availability (logistics of getting the fuel to small remote islands) and cost of fuel were quite limiting. If each village/homestead had their PV farm for charging their boats, their life would be transformed.
Getting electricity for some unreliable home usage is one thing and should be pursued if there's no viable alternative, but the moment you want to go the next step, transmission is a must.
In tropics/subtropics, even during monsoon season, you have plenty of sunlight, the needs for storage and long distance transmission capacities are much lower than in more solar-hostile environments.
Yes, that's what the word "alleviate" means: less severe, not gone.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
Do you consider this a novel insight? A factor that needs drawing attention to? Something that isn't being taken account of, and there aren't existing solutions to?
Seriously, what are you adding to the discussion of Solar + Battery systems hereby?
We’re still producing 80% of our energy from fossil fuels and that share is basically unchanged for 30 years.
The largest renewable share is hydropower, not solar.
The hype for volatile renewables on Hackernews is reallt tiresome, but I’m not surprised that the article source posted here is from a German government-funded broadcaster.
In Germany, shilling for renewables is basically part of the state propaganda.
Btw, Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants according to the official database called Marktstammdatenregister.
The energy transition in Germany is not working. Our electricity generation is neither cheap nor clean and national electricity generation has dropped by 20% since 2018.
Yet people can’t stop posting this nonsense.
Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.
They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
No, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.
Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.
The energy transition is a decades long project. Germany started early in order to bring costs down which took time. You should consider reexamining the economics
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.
Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.
The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.
If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.
The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?
You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.
What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.
Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.
