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Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

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Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#161

Post by rsynnott »

maallooc wrote: post #119
tialaramex wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern lights barely consume anything. Are you thinking of old-fashioned incandescent lighting? Improved efficiency is one of the things that allows us to have continued economic production despite reducing usage.

Nope, it’s from the statistics. Let’s talk real. Compared to fluorescent lamp, LED comsumes half of energy. It’s not like they comsume nothing. Over 68% of sockets in American households already use LED in 2018 and 13% of energy was used in residential lighting in 2018. If 32% changes to LED it will lower the percentage to 11% which is still more than what we use to refrigerate.

LEDs mostly aren’t replacing fluorescent; CFLs never caught on all that well for domestic use. They’re replacing incandescent or halogen, so more like 10x.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#162

Post by Gibbon1 »

anesmike wrote: post #154
Gibbon1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That problem with that guy is he hasn't done any math to back any of that up. When you run the numbers for say tractors, trains and mining trucks it pencils out just fine.

Confirmation bias is not good; one must look at other sources to firm up you belief and if you find other info contradicts your bias you must update your beliefs. For me ,Charles Hall's book Energy Return on Investment totally changed my mindset by reminding me thermodynamics from undergrad 46 years ago(oh shit!!1)

You need to dust off your pencil then. I took three semesters of thermo as part of my mechanical engineering program. I ran the numbers for heavy vehicles and it all works.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#163

Post by epistasis »

ktal wrote: post #22
qaq wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0? You can have utility scale storage and Nuclear as backup

Damn shame we haven't been investing in nuclear over the past few decades. Now when we need it most, it's too late.

Nuclear is one of the few technologies that has a negative learning curve. As we improve designs, it seems to get more expensive rather than less.

There was a brief window in the 1970s where US nuclear construction projects were finishing on time. But the utility industry had planned for waaaaay too much new capacity. So when all the construction projects with poor execution, that struggled to complete and therefore came in way over budget, finally came online in the early 80s, they were financial disasters in a scale that nearly bankrupted several utilities.

Since then, utilities lost their appetite. And there's basically no way for us to replace the 400 or so reactors in the world that eMate nearing end of life.

However, I'm not sure we will need nuclear. With how cheap wind and solar are getting, far faster than anybody anticipated, we have finally found the technologies that may some day provide energy "too cheap to meter." However, like nuclear they are not dispatchable (except for some designs in France), so if we want to power a grid we either need to overbuild capacity by quite a bit, or use energy storage. There's a cost trade off for the two that depends on how cheap storage gets, and how cheap extra capacity is, and how cheap transmission is from an area with different weather that day. (For example, one can imagine building 2x of panel capacity over the amount of inverter capacity on a solar install, so that even on cloudy days you can chug along at near full energy output... it all depends on the cost trade offs.)

And as fast an solar is getting cheap, far beyond expectations, so is lithium ion storage. And there are many chemistries with high specific energies (and thus unsuitable for vehicles), that we are just now dipping our toes into.

Nuclear would be a nice tool to have, if it was competitive with other technologies, but it's going to be decades before it can prove itself and establish a positive track record for deployment. Utilities have been burned too many times by financial dumpster fires.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#164

Post by lukifer »

gwright wrote: post #139
blake1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in the article, solar power is insanely cheap. So while you are right that a kWh of solar is not, on average, as valuable as a kWh of semidispatchable coal, the insane cheapness means that at some point, it is economical to massively overbuild renewable and decommission fossil fuel plants. You provide no evidence for the implausible claim that solar causes emissions to go up: your argument is only that t…

It doesn't matter that if solar/wind is cheap (or even zero) because you still have to have an alternate power source for when your intermittent power has gone AWOL. You need cheap grid-scale storage, which doesn't exist at the moment.

I don't know about its efficacy, but my favorite means of mass energy storage is a gravity battery: literally stacking heavy blocks in a huge tower, which are raised and lowered based on energy demands by automated cranes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Vault

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#165

Post by epistasis »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #105
Scoundreller wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> residential wind turbines Wind has a scalability problem. Residentially, it's only a good sell as a backup supply for when solar isn't cutting it to hopefully prevent generator use. And even that's a tough economic argument. Towers have huge economies of scale, both in total size and height. So the turbines just keep getting bigger and bigger because it's more and more cost effective.

If my understanding is correct there is curious difference in perceived scale with kinetic vs thermal energy. Based on a a rowing machine's advertised metrics, I calculated you could row across the English channel on half a packet of chocolate biscuits.

I'm not sure if this impacts your scenario, but the "calorie" commonly used in nutrition is actually a "kcal", or a thousand calories as used by physicists. Most confusing term for units ever.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#166

Post by epistasis »

avmich wrote: post #33
lallysingh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a bullshit purity test.

Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement. I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see that.

I was tremendously surprised recently by some of the clever work on making cement without CO2 emissions, starting exactly 60 minutes into this talk:

https://youtu.be/E76q-9q7ZDg

Standard hydrolysis for making (green) hydrogen from water using electricity also creates excellent chemistry for the cement process.

We must anticipate an era where there are periods of zero-marginal-cost energy so plentiful we can't use it all, followed by periods of undersupply. Storing electrical energy in hydrogen may seem completelt uneconomical right now, but combining that process with cement production could result in fantastic efficiency of process. We are going to need carbon-neutral cement somehow, and if we get hydrogen with it, and CO2 feedstock for other purposes, we may be in a really good position for all sorts of processes.

Industrial processes have been under examined as we try to become carbon neutral. That means that there's tremendous opportunity, not that it's impossible. Humans are clever when we are allowed to be, we just haven't put much innovative thought into our industrial processes in a long time, much less resigned then from the ground up!

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#167

Post by icebraining »

kanox wrote: post #53
yoavm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a natural gas plant doesn't really suffer from this "idle" problem you're describing with coal power plants. it's also much cleaner.

Why is that? I was under the impression that gas versus coal just changes the fuel that is burnt.

A gas plant can be ramped up and down quite fast, so they can be used as a so-called "peaker" plant, only producing when there's a shortage of solar/wind power. Coal takes a while to get hot and to cool down, so it's only worth using it if you need a constant stream of energy.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#168

Post by ars »

kanox wrote: post #53
yoavm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a natural gas plant doesn't really suffer from this "idle" problem you're describing with coal power plants. it's also much cleaner.

Why is that? I was under the impression that gas versus coal just changes the fuel that is burnt.

Have you ever had a camp fire/bonfire? It takes a LONG time to get the wood hot enough to burn well.

In contrast your gas stove goes on and off in a moment.

Coal vs gas is the same way.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#169

Post by pfdietz »

anesmike wrote: post #144
pfdietz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you listed there requires fossil fuels. If you think those activities require fossil fuels, you are basically saying industrial society is impossible after fossil fuels run out.

Simply put, there is not a battery big enough for these trucks, the trucks are too massive ,the battery would be massive,it unfortunately will not work, just the laws of the universe.

Except that's totally wrong. Mines are already electrifying!

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

Tell me, why do you think this vehicle cannot be made even larger? Are you thinking that batteries for such vehicles have to consist of larger cells?

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#170

Post by pfdietz »

mistermann wrote: post #131
pfdietz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, copper! Chromium! Next you're going to tell me of the fiendish plot to incorporate these into pots and pans to poison us all. There is no reason to include As in PV. There are anti-renewable propaganda screeds that pretend otherwise ("look! GaAs PV cells are a thing, therefore all PV uses As!") That leaves lead. Lead has been used for connections, but it is being phased out, not least because of EU environment…

> I suspect you are just repeating anti-renewable lies here. You speak with a tone of authority - do you have deep expertise and knowledge in this field? Yes or no? Please don't dodge the question. This is the best article I could find with about 10 minutes of googling. I have excerpted a small portion, but there is more relevant information immediately following this portion. This does not sound like a solved proble…

The listing of cadmium there should be a tipoff. Cd is used in CdTe, which is a small and shinking fraction of the PV market (most is Si, which does not use Cd; CdTe is also limited by the availability of tellurium). And I already explained about lead.

The projection there that c-Si market share will shrink seems very dubious. c-Si market share is growing, not shrinking (displacing multi xtal Si).

The waste from PV is largely glass, plastic, aluminum, and steel. All these will be in small quantities compared to what is produced elsewhere in the economy.

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