‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#251

Post by makomk » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

lumost wrote: post #63

edhelas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you don't see how much land you actually need. Maybe in America there is plenty of space, but in Europe it's way more difficult. To replace one nuclear reactor, you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel. And still need energy "at night". Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun". If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C0² backup and basica…

I don't think much thought has been given to the cost structure of nuclear peak plants. A nuclear facility which only generated power part of the time should have a longer service life and generate less waste per unit time. Meaning the high capex decommissioning process may be pushed back decades or more.

One of the things limiting the life of nuclear power plants is damage from thermal cycling. So a nuclear facility which only generates power part of the time can have a shorter service life in terms of calendar time (and will almost certainly have a shorter life in terms of time spent operating or power produced).

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#252

Post by aitchnyu » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #91

toomuchtodo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduces grid demand by localizing the energy, storing it on site thermally. Air conditioners that make ice at night and cool during the day do the same.

Freeman Dyson devised an a/c system at Princeton that involved using snow making machines to generate a large pile of ice in an insulated shed during the winter (with the doors open) and circulated coolant through the ice pile and the buildings in the summer (with the shed doors closed).

There is a passive ice pile technique, but for producing water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Stupa

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#253

Post by bostik » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:19 AM UTC

CodeGlitch wrote: post #240

bostik wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I can provide some figures. There is currently a push in London to get households install solar panels, and I expressed interest in getting a set installed to our house. Sadly, the finances don't add up. Our house is not exactly small, and optimistically you could fit 10 PV panels on the roof. At least according to the quote I received, but having scouted installations in the n…

I too looked into this a few years ago and was quoted 11 years to get my money back... Which didn't make financial sense at the time. Perhaps if it was more like 4 years I might consider it. The UK has a lot of cloud cover so I do wonder if we should stick with wind power which is doing really well with the off shore installations. Plus nuclear... For the rare times the wind doesn't blow.

I suspect it's not just the cloud cover. Looking at the map, it's quite depressing to note just how high up north even London really is. Berlin, Warsaw and Amsterdam are all similarly positioned. If we pan west along the 50° north parallel, the first reasonably large city in the American continent is ... Winnipeg.

We just don't get that much sunlight throughout the year to start with.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#254

Post by baybal2 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #174

BurningFrog wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably how the Chinese refer to it? You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.

I don't think Wuxi is insignificant. Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to hav…

> Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialise anything they can about China.

Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them.

The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industrial might, with a Western partner just appropriating the credit.

The crowd dominating intellectual discourse in the West make their countries a giant disservice by closing peoples eyes on this.

The loss of intellectual potential in Western economies came dangerously fast following the deindustrialisation.

With how thins go, the West will soon have nothing to show for its inability to make things, but also no brains to design it, and soon no money to buy it.

The famous "Designed in California, made in China" is not a statement of proves, but insecurity.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#255

Post by Tade0 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #250

puranjay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think researchers underestimated how much solar simply “makes sense” to the average person. Once the price is reasonable enough, people are very easily able to latch onto the idea of using what they already know and feel - the sun’s heat. Whenever I mention the solar panels in my parents house, the first question is always about the price. When I tell them they will break even in a few years, their next question is…

> There is never any skepticism about the technology, the safety, the long term impact (as you would have if someone was setting up a nuclear or gas power plant). They simply “get it” This is also a bad thing, because there are some real issues with PV panels too: leaking toxic materials, recycling problems, environmental side-effects because you need to mine for rare earths and critical metals, etc. It's far from be…

Correction: Crystalline silicon solar cells, the most popular type today, require no rare earths.

The most expensive and rare element in them is silver - used for the reflective layer underneath.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#256

Post by kragen » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #254

kragen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Wuxi is insignificant. Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to hav…

> Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialise anything they can about China. Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them. The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industri…

I don't think Western partners are just appropriating the credit here, though. Lots of people in lots of countries have been working hard for decades to develop and improve photovoltaic cells and their manufacturing processes. A huge number of those people are Chinese, but by no means all of them.

Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works cited in the bibliography. Lots of Chinese research groups, a Korean one, some Arabic, some Indian, an Iranian/UK team, a team from Brazil, a few teams from the US (made up of foreign graduate students, of course).

Look at the citations to one of the Brazilian team's influential review papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9038016761746238692... — what do the surnames of the authors tell you? On the first page, I see Indian, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and English research teams, and from the US, Sajjad Ahmad's team at UNLV — first author, assistant professor Saria Bukhary of Pakistan.

It's far from an all-Chinese-research field.

But it certainly isn't just "Australian smarts" either.

Agreed about "Designed in California, made in China." That's an absurdity.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#257

Post by gandalfian » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #78

puranjay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think researchers underestimated how much solar simply “makes sense” to the average person. Once the price is reasonable enough, people are very easily able to latch onto the idea of using what they already know and feel - the sun’s heat. Whenever I mention the solar panels in my parents house, the first question is always about the price. When I tell them they will break even in a few years, their next question is…

Where are we at in 2021 for pay off period? Does it vary by region?

The key is do you use lots of electricity during summer days when the panel are producing? If so a 5-10% return even with loss of capital is possible. If you don't consume the electricity yourself then it's not really economic. Obviously closer to the equator and higher your electricity prices the better it gets.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#258

Post by oblio » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

Rerarom wrote: post #247

MrPatan wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 02010 > 02019 I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?". It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.

https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

Sorry, but: pfffft! Pedantry of the nth level.

On the other hand, 64k of RAM ought to be enough for everyone :-D

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#259

Post by phonon » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #147

handol wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (10 million watts of electricity) 10 million watt-hours of electricity Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.

Yeah, I don’t know the right way to write it. When I look at the app the reports our solar panel output and say I just want the output for all of 2020, it reports a figure just shy of 10 MWh. The previous years were close to the same figure. How do you say what the total output from a system was over an entire year?

You can say 36,000 Megajoules if you prefer :-)

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#260

Post by tralarpa » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #234

jacobolus wrote: post #70

> "[in 2000] Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi" A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as…

I used to have a Chinese colleague who when asked where he came from would answer that he was from "A small town, you wouldn't know it. Only 3M people". He was right; I had never heard of it. I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.

I am laughing because something very similar happened to me. I visited a friend in one of those "smaller" cities in China (3M; not even in the top 30). He told me that his parents had moved to a nearby "village" after retirement. The village: >200k.