We forget Feds fund American roads and local congressional districts like it that way. Our people grid is a road grid accessing an energy grid. Every single story suburban home is a waste of space and HVAC. Rationalizing costs will penalize cheaply built homes along roads built with federal funding. Our TFR's have peaked and Sante Fe Institute folks do not predict happy sprawl. Look at DC or Boston Building town homes and condos more densely on shared public transport with Uber fill in. Quite successful medium enterprises spread out by Eisenhower cannot find employees. Various locales like Columbus, OH and Pittsburgh are slated for gathering that slack into ecosystem. The economic concerns of remote Americans playing fake prairie homesteader are not especially relevant to long term planning. Plan for yourself last to see the big plans in motion. There are business opportunities skating to where large pluralities of pucks are going. Levis made jeans for rushing gold rushers and lived to tell the tale.
US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
101–110 of 172 posts
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#102So mining bitcoin is 30% cheaper!
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fascinating if true. Do you gave any sources, I'd be really interested in reading more on the matter.
This gives a good overview. What people miss is that during the summer the sun is up all the time. (In the winter, not so much.) And average cloud cover is also accounted for. http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/countries/europe/EU-Glob_op...
Thanks! That is quite surprising, and very encouraging.
It seems that solar is a very good overall fit for even most of the world, and once the tech is good enough to be used in huge numbers the differences can probably be compensated with other, local power sources (like hydro in Scandinavia, which is huge there).
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fascinating if true. Do you gave any sources, I'd be really interested in reading more on the matter.
This gives a good overview. What people miss is that during the summer the sun is up all the time. (In the winter, not so much.) And average cloud cover is also accounted for. http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/countries/europe/EU-Glob_op...
Do I understand correctly that the wishful thinking value of 75% photovoltaic conversion efficiency is plotted in the diagram?
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#105When will prices drop below $20k for a full install? I get so frustrated when I hear that the price keeps dropping, but the price for a consumer install hasn't dropped below $20k in years. If I do the installation myself, will that make it cheaper?
I suspect a lot of it has to do with housing prices where you live. It's a pretty easy upgrade to a house, and adding $20K to the mortgage for most houses these days is trivial. If you are selling, then you can probably even make a pretty decent return on investment because people are willing to tack on such "small" amounts when they buy the home. So until solar panels become a standard that everyone expects in a home, or until the next big market crash, I suspect solar installations will have inflated price tags.
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#106We forget Feds fund American roads and local congressional districts like it that way. Our people grid is a road grid accessing an energy grid. Every single story suburban home is a waste of space and HVAC. Rationalizing costs will penalize cheaply built homes along roads built with federal funding. Our TFR's have peaked and Sante Fe Institute folks do not predict happy sprawl. Look at DC or Boston Building town home…
TFR = total fertility rate?
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#107Imagine if we could do solar in space.. infinite area- no soil wasted, the power transmitted as a ray of death... oh, so this is why we do not do solar in space.
How about building something similar to a space power station that loads huge batteries, then gravitationally launches them towards ground, while on the other side an automated system launches rockets with empty batteries that docks to the power station?
Guaranteed to be hugely net energy negative in the energy required to launch the batteries. Think about payload fractions and the huge amount of energy in rocket fuel.
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#108Imagine if we could do solar in space.. infinite area- no soil wasted, the power transmitted as a ray of death... oh, so this is why we do not do solar in space.
How about building something similar to a space power station that loads huge batteries, then gravitationally launches them towards ground, while on the other side an automated system launches rockets with empty batteries that docks to the power station?
Step 1: Build a space elevator
Step 2: ...
Step 3: Profit!
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there. It probably does have an impact but at this point unless population declines or energy use dramatically decreases I think we need to focus on minimizing human impact on the environment and not stopping everything that isn't completely harmless.
> Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there. Can you cite a significant environmental group that completely opposes all large desert solar projects for this reason? Otherwise this reads like a rather unfair characterization. In a recent case [1], the Sierra Club successfully argued that a planned so…
Endangered species need to go extinct. We are committing a high level universal crime by intervening in life's natural hygiene process.
Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deserts are abandunt- in fact they are the default ecology on all planets. https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/229_RSER_WildLife_2011.pdf If solar panels could be modified to create substained microclimates below that would be awesome. After all, there is still enough straylight getting below, to allow for a average forrestplant to exist.
Speaking of which, they also could be used to condense the (low) air humidity and channel it into the ground, so the possibility to create a micro ecology system is even more higher. Water immediately attracts life.
There was a small project where somebody used a hygroscopic substance (Silicagel) to collect water in the atmosphere in the desert and freed it with concentrated sunlight, and then condensed it.