In Lebanon, solar power is booming • Hacker News Board

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#151

Post by llampx » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #102

llampx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pareto principle - optimize for 80% of the load and you probably can get by with 20% of the effort. Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution.

> Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution. V2G (or generally, electric) cars are absurdly expensive even in Western countries.

Fully agree, but if we put in the groundwork now to be able to connect these cars to give back to the grid now, they can already help in peak load situations.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#152

Post by ETH_start » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #126

berkes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system. And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel price…

> All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite. That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g…

All of the long-lasting waste generated by nuclear plants can be used as fuel in breeder reactors. Newer generation reactors are also immune to the kind of meltdowns that afflicted Chernobyl and Fukushima.

It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH":

https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#153

Post by tchaffee » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #150

wara23arish wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what lebanese relied on before solar. There would be generators owned by mafia type people that would sell electricity to neighborhoods. Once we ran out of dollar currency to buy gas people resorted to solar

This is not an option for us in Ukraine, this is not a sunny desert country.

Solar is going up all over northern Europe and is profitable without government subsidies. Cloudy is just fine for today's solar panels. The technology improves on an almost yearly basis.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#154

Post by brewsmithy » Sun, Jan 15, 2023, 12:25 AM UTC

shapefrog wrote: post #72

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Halved our water heating bill. I don't care about water usage, it's extremely cheap here and highly recyclable. That's why I framed my comment with the energy conservation context.

A shower heat recovery system would be better, which seems like such low hanging energy saving I am unsure why it isnt more of a thing.

There are a couple reasons waste heat recovery has not been adopted in the US anyway. The designs up to this point have been adaptations of industrial designs, not specific designs for residential use.