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Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

extremetech.com

121–130 of 161 posts

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#121
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But renewable energies could replace nuclear (and other sources) for new plants that will be built in the future. Nuclear has a very high initial cost, and shutting down current plants while they're still efficient and safe enough wouldn't be a sound choice, but for replacements of ageing plants and for new constructions cheaper and cheaper renewable energies could realistically displace them in the next decades.

According to Wikipedia, the largest solar facility generates 354MW of electricity (assuming ideal conditions). In contrast, the recently approved AP1000s at the Plant Vogtle Georgia site each generate 1100 megawatts, rain or shine. So if the best solar facility, using 1600 acres of land can only provide 1/3 of one new reactor, your math just won't work.

Exactly.

I'm repeating myself in this tread, but seriously, I recommend to everyone taking a look at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/ - it has all the numbers, including e.g. power densities of solar and wind plants in watts per square meter.

According to that book, there's no way solar or wind could compete directly with nuclear. It just doesn't add up.

There is no way to have any serious discussion about energy without doing at least some rudimentary calculations and comparing numbers, instead of adjectives and hopes.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#122
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation of electricity around the globe is not neccessary. Electricity usage is considerably lower during nighttime. Thus solar and wind fit in with our natural rhythm quite nicely. And it is also produced near the place there it is being consumed. Another plus. But still the author is right, we need ways to store electricity and we will also need a much more flexible grid than the one we have today. The neo l…

Germany's solar stimulus is highly questionable. Sure, it gets solar panels installed on a large scale, but government forced diffusion of an innovation is a questionable idea. Pumping money in a relatively narrow market and creating an artificial demand situation leads to a lot of side effects, i.e. Germany's quasi-stimulation of the Asian component manufacturing market.

Compared to pumping money into pointless wars I think pumping money into subsidized solar panels is an excellent use of money. Sure there are many other ways to spend that money, and some of them may even be better.

But this is definitely long term thinking on their part. Already Germany is the current world leader when it comes to renewables as a percentage of total generating power.

As the price of power goes up this 'stupid' strategy starts to look smarter by the day.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#123
post #4

That is some amazing technology right there, almost fun to read because it sounds like science fiction but it's real. And privately designed/built/owned particle accelerators? It's definitely a new era. What if one day the other side of the globe getting sunlight powered the grid for the other half? Of course this would require very peaceful nations on each continent, so even if we had the cost-effective technology n…

Transmitting the power around the planet isn't a given. You'd need super conductors to limit power loss.

Line losses decrease as voltage increases. Also, using DC instead of AC can further decrease losses.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can build power plants in the middle of the desert and ship power out. The technology exists; we just haven't done it yet. Transmission losses are not a concern for superconducting cables (though maintaining the cryostat jacket is). Such cables are currently being proven before being used in larger grid connections. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/superconduc... http://www.htstriax.com/columbus.ht…

The real problem is that a nuclear power plant needs a staff of several hundred people. They can't travel 500 miles every day to work to the middle of a desert. Even if they wanted to relocate there, they would have to build a little town to serve these people and their families, and now we are back to the original problem.

I think he meant a solar plant in the middle of the desert, not a nuclear plant. Solar plants don't need staffs that large.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#125

I think I may have misunderstood the manufacturing process. To my reading, it looks like they have 3mm-thick wafers, accumulate a 20mm-thick layer of hydrogen, which then shears off in a furnace, leaving...a 3mm-thick wafer. Which they started with. Thanks in advance to whoever explains how I've misunderstood this. EDIT: Oh, I neglected to pay attention to units. The above should be 3mm, 20- micrometer , and 2.98mm,…

Err, 2.998, not 2.98.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, those are pretty cool. Hate to be around when they lost cooling (dropping out of superconductivity would be a pretty energetic event :-). But its good news on that front. If you've ever seen the insulator jacket in an underground HVDC cable it is huge.

Most of these systems both carry power and sit in a pool of coolant so they rarely experience such an 'energetic event'. AKA, if they lose power they don't need to keep things cool AND it usually takes a few hours for things to warm up anyway.

Not a superconducting cable, but this is a great read:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But renewable energies could replace nuclear (and other sources) for new plants that will be built in the future. Nuclear has a very high initial cost, and shutting down current plants while they're still efficient and safe enough wouldn't be a sound choice, but for replacements of ageing plants and for new constructions cheaper and cheaper renewable energies could realistically displace them in the next decades.

No. It can't. And pretending it can is a problem. Solar is nice. It'd be FAN-GODDAMN-TASTIC if we could use solar power as the backbone of our power generation. But we can't, it's just not feasible. Solar today is half of a power plant. Much like wind Solar generates power when its convenient to its own schedule, not ours, and sometimes that means it generates zero power. This. Is. A. Problem. It is, in fact, the pro…

Today we can use solar and wind serendipitously. They run on top of base power and when they provide power they allow us to keep gas powered generators offline.

Solar thermal+thermal storage could be used in climates closer to the equator. The US ran an experimental setup with 8 hours endurance after sundown.

In the case of cooling equipment, solar coincides well with demand.

You are most certainly right that solar won't cover all our baseload power needs. We don't need to cover it all. We just need to whittle down the unsustainable and environmentally unfriendly parts as much as we can.

Subsidizing winners isn't something the government should be in the business of doing. However, penalizing losers is precisely what we have a government for, and CO2 emitting power is a losing proposition for the future.

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#128
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can build power plants in the middle of the desert and ship power out. The technology exists; we just haven't done it yet. Transmission losses are not a concern for superconducting cables (though maintaining the cryostat jacket is). Such cables are currently being proven before being used in larger grid connections. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/superconduc... http://www.htstriax.com/columbus.ht…

Forget supercondictivity, what about HVDC [1]? HVDC can be as efficient as 97%, compared with the US average of 93%. That 4% "inefficiency tax" would likely pay for long-haul HVDC connectors (as outlined in one of Obama's 2008 energy proposals) within years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Adv...

You know I've never heard of HVDC until I read this. So was Edison right all along?

Re: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

#129
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some respects wind is like hydro, in that there are a limited number of good places to site a wind farm. As the number of turbines grows there will be diminishing returns as the new sites are less good because they have less wind, longer distances to existing power infrastructure, more damaging weather incidents, etc.

We're nowhere near that limit. From Wikipedia: According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the contiguous United States has the potential for 10,459 GW of onshore wind power. The capacity could generate 37 petawatt-hours (PW·h) annually, an amount nine times larger than current total U.S. electricity consumption. The U.S. also has large wind resources in Alaska, and Hawaii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win…

Since we're engaging in fantasy (for now) what would happen if we DID extract that much energy (or even a significant fraction of that) from the atmosphere? What kind of climate change would that precipitate?
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