It is so full of hyperbole but hardly any useful fact!
Japan unveils first solar super-panel
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#22In my experience, no matter how many panels you install, Solar can cover power consumption 30-40% of its max capacity. Winter, night, bad weather will eat the rest. To go beyond the 30-40% you will need energy store or alternative sources. This is still great but not a 100% solution.
At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day. Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, wher…
> A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night.
Utility companies gave away streetlights, security lights, etc., because they would raise the electricity usage generated at times of lower demand. This minimized the need to spin up and spin down generating plants and let them make money on what would have been otherwise wasted power.
Nighttime lighting doesn't consume all of the excess power generated at night. Utilities have cleverly shifted power consumption loads to later times through TOD pricing for residential and industrial customers.
It's no secret that I'm a big advocate for turning down lights at night. Increasing dependency on solar and batteries would make running electricity-intensive processes and industries cheaper during the daytime and reduce the need for baseload power at night.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#23Perovskite cells still don't make much sense for the majority of applications (and I suspect they never will): they're expensive, generally use toxic materials, and degrade much more quickly than silicon panels. Silicon panels are cheap, non-toxic, and long-lasting and plenty efficient enough for 90% of use cases.
Agreed, thought if we could get silicon + perovskite working well with stable perovskite that combined efficiency might be worthwhile.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#24In my experience, no matter how many panels you install, Solar can cover power consumption 30-40% of its max capacity. Winter, night, bad weather will eat the rest. To go beyond the 30-40% you will need energy store or alternative sources. This is still great but not a 100% solution.
At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day. Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, wher…
> Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day.
I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#25Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time. In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago , France installed 34 GW of nuclear. All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available. Or to agree that we have, fundamentall…
Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally.
And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.
Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...
The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#26Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time. In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago , France installed 34 GW of nuclear. All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available. Or to agree that we have, fundamentall…
I’d be open to making a prediction (on longbets.org) that in the 2025 to 2034 timeframe, more solar, wind, and batteries get deployed globally than any 10 year period of your choice for nuclear. And if you want to limit that to winter time capacity that’s fine by me.
The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#27Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time. In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago , France installed 34 GW of nuclear. All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available. Or to agree that we have, fundamentall…
> we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating [nuclear] energy
Yes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#28Besides the words "Japan" and "solar", the headline has nothing at all to do with the content of the article or technical reality, and sounds more like the beginning of an anime story arc. Like someone prompted an AI with "every headline should have a power level over 9000".
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#29>Renewable energy in Japan will receive a *seismic shift* Maybe not the best analogy for the most earthquake-prone country in the world?
It would suck to build a massive solar panel array only for it to break after an earthquake. Hopefully they are seismic proofed like many buildings there.
Solar PV arrays are not really contiguous structures like buildings. A major earthquake could certainly cause some damage, but the fundamental design of the arrays makes them much less sensitive to seismic activity than any building.
Re: Japan unveils first solar super-panel
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day. Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, wher…
> Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California
This model prioritizes generation [0] over storage, by dramatic reliance on transmission systems. That's not inherently a stupid thing to do, but given the reality of global and even national politics, most places are prioritizing storage [1] over generation and limiting transmission goals to national needs.
[0] because India would need to generate not just it's daytime requirements, but also Spain's overnight requirements, and so forth.
[1] because each nation/grid system would need to store significant excess generation to make it through the night/storm systems etc.