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We're going to need a lot of solar panels

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Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#451

Post by vasco »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #426
hgomersall wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but generally renewable enthusiasts are also saying "we need to improve our housing stock". That's another of the opportunities to improve people's lives that will come through necessary change.

Quoted post unavailable.

You make some good points in the middle of the edgy writing, but how do you think people get to the point of proving out new technology?

You'd be shouting at the magic black gold people too back in the day. How would it light people's houses and require a full grid installation, and fires and blackouts, when candles already fix the real world problem.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#452

Post by jillesvangurp »

walrus01 wrote: post #4

We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…

Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here.

I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.

Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#453

Post by beebeepka »

magic_hamster wrote: post #410
beebeepka wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Venting is fine but but is there a point you are trying to make? Besides the "some people blah blah" strawman? I shouldn't put solar panels on my roof because it would not fix someone else's problems? What kind of logic is that?

I think they're trying to say that insulation (and probably other factors) is not just one person's problem but an issue of a huge scale, which is true. If solar works for you, then that's great, but for a lot of people (the majority?) it wouldn't work, or at least not without spending a very large amount of money to retrofit your house for it. I think it's a good point even if stated quite poorly.

Let me put it this way: is me having solar panels making things worse for "the majority"? If so, how?

Because it sounded like the usual trope that if a solution does not fix all problems for all humans everywhere, than it it sucks and the person doing what they can is a naive fool, if not a straight up villain.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#454

Post by brazzy »

betwixthewires wrote: post #429
brazzy wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. No, let's say that you are off by three or four orders of magnitude. Because your first estimate really is that bad, and without it, your entire "argument" falls apart.

So draw me a picture then. Let's say I'm off by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, photosynthesis is .001% efficient or whatever. Show me how you create enough energy, the equivalent of a billion years worth of solar energy shining down on three quarters of the surface of the earth, every 200 years. 2000 years. 200,000 years. Without unfathomable environmental destruction. Or how you reduce the energy consumption of 8 billi…

It's not photosynthesis that's .00001% efficient or whatever, it's the whole process, because it's also fuelling the entire lifetime of those organisms before they become fuel in the ground, and all those organisms that don't have just the right conditions for becoming fuel in the ground, and all the fuel in the ground that didn't stay there over those millions of years because it didn't have the right conditions.

And in any case, the problem we need to solve is not at all replicating the amount of energy stored by fuel in the ground. The problem we need to solve is generating the amount of energy we're actually using. And that has the advantage that we know that number quite precisely, instead of having to derive it based on ridiculously imprecise guesses.

And TFA makes a projection for required area using exactly this, and arrives at

> 300 TW of solar generation capacity, occupying about 5% of Earth’s land surface area, and split between roof top installations in cities and dedicated plants on nearby less developed land. For comparison, agriculture uses 18% of Earth’s land surface area, and largely uninhabited deserts are 33%.

And that completely ignores the additional power generation capacity of wind power.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#455

Post by illiac786 »

yayachiken wrote: post #412
illiac786 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what this person meant is the renewable enthusiasts treat insulation as something easily done whereas it will take 100 years to insulate the majority of houses in Europe in my view…

I know you are just illustrating an opinion and not meaning it literally, but I want to stress how ridiculous your number of 100 years is in reality. The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years. Which means that on average, the house will be torn down and rebuilt after at most 100 years, because additional upkeep would not make economic sense. This means that if you do not chang…

>The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years

Source?

Counter examples: my house is built 1908. Lots of other houses built around the same time in the area I live in. My parents live in a house from 1749. The entire village where they live is made of houses built 200+ years ago, it's written on the house in general, hence easy to check.

Hence I very much stand by my prediction it will take 100 years to isolate the vast majority of houses in Europe. Of course it's just a prediction based on my observations, I'm not an expert in the area.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#456

Post by Roritharr »

brtkdotse wrote: post #433
ekianjo wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better insulation better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.

The actual insulation is stupid cheap when you look at the ROI. However, installing in on an existing house is really tricky and you can cause a lot of moisture related damage if you do it in the wrong way.

The house I live in, like everyone's in my street, is from the late 1800s. Insulating those houses from the outside is very expensive, to the tune of 200k, where the house is worth around 500k in the inflated environment we're in. At the very same time, I haven't found a single insurance company willing to insure the house after insulation for insulation related moisture damage.

This makes insulating this house an absurdly bad financial decision, since once you have moisture damage in any part of this material, you can basically demolish most of the walls since it soaks like a sponge.

Mind you, I have not started going into the pitfalls of the legality of even touching a house this old in Germany, where you have to deal with "Denkmalschutz".

Insulating new construction and retrofitting insulation are two absolutely different things and barely have anything to do with each other from the cost-benefit ratio.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#457

Post by pawsforthought »

rektide wrote: post #75
oceanplexian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand it’s an interesting engineering challenge, but I am always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an ecosystem with glass is “good for the environment”. It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.

It'a really weird but there's a surprisingly growing base of farming amid a solar farm, where apparently many plants just cant stand the pure sun & benefit from some periodic shade during the day. I dont know how much I believe it but combined agriculture/solar use seems perhaps legit to be a thing. Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant s…

It’s known as agrivoltaics [1]. It works especially well with highly shade-tolerant crops like leafy vegetables, stone fruits, berries, etc., but also works with grazing or arable cultivation.

There are various possible configurations of panels that still allow farm machinery to access the crop beneath, and the crop itself is protected from heat stress, wind, heavy rain, and hail. Shading reduces evaporative water loss, lessening the need for irrigation, and the crop has a local cooling effect for the PV panels, which improves their efficiency.

According to an extended report from the Fraunhofer Institute [2], the main challenges are regulatory – at least in Germany, but I imagine similar hurdles in the rest of the EU. Essentially, difficulties obtaining building permits; negation of farming subsidies from enclosure of land; and obstacles to connecting to the grid and receiving feed-in tariffs.

Those challenges all seem surmountable, and there’s surely huge promise in the vast amount of land that would be unlocked for energy generation, never mind the synergies favorable for horticulture in particular.

[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/key-topics/integrated-photo...

[2]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#458

Post by switch007 »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #336
jnsaff2 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation. I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is overkill for them.

Yes, absolutely - the house is a pretty big country side house from 1925, not uncommon in Germany. But (almost) impossible to insulate efficiently. My estimates where €150k to €200k, just for the insulation, windows, and renewed heaters. In comparison, an 'oversized' 70 kWp PV only costs €100k, and also returns some income when not all of the power is used. The parameters widely differ between country and city: In th…

That estimate seems insane. Was that a “we’re too busy, go away” estimate?

How big is the house?

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#459

Post by avhon1 »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #430
benevol wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered https://www.KryonEngine.org ?

What im looking at?

A perpetual motion machine. ("Free Energy" has long been a used as a synonym by those who believe it is imminently possible.)

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#460

Post by vasco »

Teever wrote: post #253
WalterBright wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The communists in Norway, like Russia, benefit enormously from pumping oil out of the ground, which goes to the government. In Norway's case, it's 20% of the GDP. Probably much more today with all the oil price increases.

Can you comment on the communists of Quebec? As a Canadian, this is what I find lacking in debate on American sites like Reddit or HN. Canada is very similar to the United States, another way of saying that is that Canada does things slightly different yet the results seem to be profoundly different than the States. Why is that, and what are we as Canadians doing that Americans and others around the world should atte…

Quebec has a communist government? Wikipedia tells me liberal / constitutional monarchy.
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