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Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

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Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#91
post #50
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been living in the west my whole life and have traveled between Colorado to California through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc 7 or 8 times, so yes I've seen an empty western road before. Tumbleweeds was tongue in cheek but there's plenty of dirt, trash and other flying debris that will get baked onto a glassy surface out southwest.

Well, even in the Sahara there's sand and sandstorms piling it on solar panels... There's no place that's 100% immune from all dirt/leaves/etc. Still shouldn't be much of a problem in practice...

I think the key difference is whether the panel is placed at ground level (as in a solar road) or raised (as in most large-scale solar installations where the panels are raised on mounts that can also move and track the sun). The latter is pretty much self-cleaning when it comes to dry debris because the wind would eventually blow them away onto the ground (where the former will collect them forever).

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#92

Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and increasingly hydropower too). Fake environmentalists: "We have an existential crisis! We must change our energy strategy to save humanity!" Engineers: "That's quite a problem. Here's a way to solve it. It's called fission. Here are some power plant designs." Fake…

Do you know what? Private industry doesn't care about nuclear. The only way to build nuclear is through government projects which is why there is immense pressure by nuclear companies to publicly dismiss everything that can support itself. Companies set up their own coal plants, natural gas plants, solar farms, wind farms and so on but what they don't do is build their own nuclear plants. Come up with better power pl…

There are better power plant designs, but regulations are based on designs from 50+ years ago, and thus no one has built a new safer design since.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#93
post #46

Our area of Oregon recently banned new solar farms on the grounds that it detracts from the beauty of the landscape – a wine region with lots of tourism. Ironically, that very beauty is threatened by the changing climate, which clean energy could help mitigate.

Let's be real for a second. Climate change isn't going to destroy Oregon's wine-growing regions within our lifetimes. A solar farm will change it within months. You can support or oppose solar farm bans according to your liking, but you should do so on the basis of facts. The two forces aren't even close to equal in magnitude and timing.

Is that supposed a joke? Solar panels are just blue squares. Other than aesthetics they do practically nothing to hurt Oregon.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#94

Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and increasingly hydropower too). Fake environmentalists: "We have an existential crisis! We must change our energy strategy to save humanity!" Engineers: "That's quite a problem. Here's a way to solve it. It's called fission. Here are some power plant designs." Fake…

Wind turbines can be offshore. You can buy a wind turbine "off the shelf" and have people without nuclear training plonk it down wherever you want it, approximately as soon as you can stump up the money and get planning approval.

The USA has been adding wind turbines at the rate of ~four a day every day for the last fourty years, for a total of some ~60,000. In that same time the USA has started 4 nuclear power plants[1], all in 2013, all unfinished/in progress. The UK has ~11,000 wind turbines. We have 1 nuclear plant started construction in the last 30 years (Hinkley C) and it is two years in, and over budget. UK has five more proposed nuclear plants, and of those two are shelved and one cancelled[3].

It's not proven that the UK or USA still has the ability to build working nuclear reactors, or the ability to organise and approve and fund them - look at this link [2] about the last few years of the UK government changing, making, and cancelling approval and funding plans. Or that the UK will be able to source and transport nuclear fuels and wastes after Brexit.

Even putting all that aside, and assuming the world can source enough nuclear fuels for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and assuming we can overcome concerns about terrorism, and about getting a large increase in skilled people to build and maintain them, we can build and install wind turbines today, but if we start building one new nuclear plant a week it will be approximately a Trillion dollars (Hinkley point C in the UK is expected to be £23Bn+, the UK would need ~50 to go entirely nuclear for several Trillion pounds, the USA would need many more) and a decade or two to get a large amount of power generation from them. In two decades, wind and solar could blanket the country if we wanted, solar price drops, lithium ion battery price drops and other storage systems could make significant progress for a fraction of that money.

I'm not against nuclear in principle, but the first UK production reactor in 1966 was £30 million which is about £0.5 Billion in today's money. In 2008 the government was estimating £2.5 billion per plant, the chairman of E.ON said it could be £5 billion per plant. By 2012 estimates were up to £7 billion. Hinkley Point C had an actual estimated construction cost of £20 billion. In 2013 Centrica withdrew citing higher than expected costs. By 2015 the UK government agreed to pay double-rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C as a subsidy of about £6 billion on top of the build costs. By 2016 the UK National Audit Office said that subsidy could end up being more like £30 billion all-in. In 2017 they revised that to £50 billion. In 2016 the construction cost exceeded the entire market cap. of EDF the French company supposed to be building it. By 2020 it's two years into construction and construction costs are up another £3 billion to ~£23bn and we're Brexiting. It's been described as the most expensive power station in the world. The UK government has banned the funding model used from being used on future power plants.

Realistically, are we going to be 5 years down the line from here, with costs increasing so much the project gets shelved unfinished, or EDF collapsing and unable to finish it? There has to be a non-zero chance of that happening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...

[3]

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#95
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five year" -- Milton Friedman (exaggerating, somewhat) Better to put them on home roofs, and arrange for them to be owned by the homeowners, designed so that the occupants are (literally) empowered when the grid is mismanaged, as in California. On highway medians control is more centralized, and they would require more mainte…

It's most efficient to put the panels in a centralized location with high amounts of sunlight on mounts that track the sun. You get significantly higher yield because of the tracking and the location, and maintenance is cheaper because it's centralized. The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "em…

Solar farms are in centralized locations. It is entirely possible that no farm has been constructed in that specific area.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's most efficient to put the panels in a centralized location with high amounts of sunlight on mounts that track the sun. You get significantly higher yield because of the tracking and the location, and maintenance is cheaper because it's centralized. The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "em…

The balance of tracking mounts is not trivial. They increase efficiency a lot (up to 40% for dual-axis trackers) but they also decrease ground a lot coverage, they increase cost of installation and cost of ownership, and they decrease availability.

It balances out to the positive.

See https://heliogen.com/

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#97
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's most efficient to put the panels in a centralized location with high amounts of sunlight on mounts that track the sun. You get significantly higher yield because of the tracking and the location, and maintenance is cheaper because it's centralized. The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "em…

Empowerment isn’t really a fantasy if there are rolling blackouts but your own power is still on. Sadly, not a hypothetical in California. Im thinking just from a national security/redundancy/risk reduction standpoint it makes sense to move more generation closer to demand. There are lots of single points of failure in our power grid currently. Edit: this is assuming the solar setup is designed to enable use when pow…

> Empowerment isn’t really a fantasy if there are rolling blackouts but your own power is still on. Sadly, not a hypothetical in California.

Seems easier to get a generator or a Power Wall, but either ends up being pretty expensive for handling the 2 hours of rolling blackouts for the first time in 20 years. There are also longer-term outages, maybe several hours every few years? And this is for people in population centers. Living in the mountains is a different story.

> Im thinking just from a national security/redundancy/risk reduction standpoint it makes sense to move more generation closer to demand

I'd rather put the money towards removing those single points of failure.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#98

Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and increasingly hydropower too). Fake environmentalists: "We have an existential crisis! We must change our energy strategy to save humanity!" Engineers: "That's quite a problem. Here's a way to solve it. It's called fission. Here are some power plant designs." Fake…

There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit (iirc 30 years). It can at best be used as a transition source or a supplemental source.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#99

My mother ayed tomatoes in the spring when it was still cool. She covered them with clear plastic bags as she always has. But she needed one more bag so she used a blue recycling bag on one of the plants. Blue tinged really it's almost clear. I pointed out to her one of the plants had yellow leaves. It was the plant with the blue bag. Later in the summer the blue bag plant produced fruit just like the other plants. B…

The ratio of red and blue light controls various functions of a plant. In the context of aquarium plants, more red light makes them get tall and leggy, more blue light makes them be compact and bushy.

https://gpnmag.com/article/effects-of-blue-light-on-plants/ talks a bit about it in the context of greenhouses and tomatoes, the picture in the middle shows 6 plants grown with wildly different red/blue ratios.

If the balance of the light coming through your solar panel was problematic, you could always filter out some of the overabundant light.

Re: Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balance of tracking mounts is not trivial. They increase efficiency a lot (up to 40% for dual-axis trackers) but they also decrease ground a lot coverage, they increase cost of installation and cost of ownership, and they decrease availability.

It balances out to the positive. See https://heliogen.com/

That's a heliostat system, not a solar panel system. Both involve the sun but they do so very differently.

It's also a company which wants to sell heliostats, they're not going to tell you it sucks.

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