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Solar is winning the energy race

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Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#51

Post by torginus »

foragerdev wrote: post #10

Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government a…

It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.

The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.

Not to mention, all the red tape.

But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.

sOcIaLiSM!!!

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#52

Post by belorn »

nmehner wrote: post #27
cbmuser wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It is working perfectly fine: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-

The extensive EV car subsidies has really got people to buy EV. With 98.3% of all new cars sold, it is amazing what subsidies that accounts for more than 25% of the value of a new car does to encourage people to buy electric. In Sweden, it is a well know concept that when Norway do subsidies, they don't do it ungenerously.

Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#53

Post by broken-kebab »

metalman wrote: post #3
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

Thank you, China. One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.

I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up ti…

I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.

For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.

Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.

At a large enough scale everything gets different.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#54

Post by didgetmaster »

I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.

If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#55

Post by awongh »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

Thank you, China. One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.

There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?

A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?

One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.

-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#56

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

kwakubiney wrote: post #31

Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?

> Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly

This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...

https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L1_zvqg73Q&t=590s

A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.

And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/tayavo/what_happen...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456963

Have a look at this, which is a (semi) serious hacker attempt to make it a bit more practical.

https://www.dartsolar.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...

He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#58

Post by Moldoteck »

don_esteban wrote: post #41
Moldoteck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils

Another advantage of solar that it is decentralized and difficult/too costly to shut off by a country bombing you (Ukraine benefits from this) (unlike a big centralized power plant). I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices). A farmer with enough free land and significant di…

full decentralization is not a feature but a bug imo - you spend a lot on transmission. Germany now spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment and has highest prices in EU. It's the best to have a hybrid - centralized pp and centralized solar/wind parks but distributed evenly across country. Ukraine had also massive loss of ren power because most solar+wind was in south (because of better weather) and destroyed by russia or captured.

Electric machinery is good but crazy expensive, esp in farming sector. Eastern EU still buys bellorusian tractors because of their price...

PV is already sufficiently cheap, the problem is new units start competing with existing units so gains are getting smaller unless you have lots of hydro or bess

Agree about huge sums being spent on fossils, it's a strong grip and getting off isnt cheap either becaus of necessary grid upgrades

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#59

Post by embedding-shape »

defrost wrote: post #36
kwakubiney wrote: post #31

Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?

You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc. Maybe in time efficiencies will get there. * https://worldsolarchallenge.org/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY * https://www.youtube.…

Ok, so lets say we didn't want 100% of the energy to come from those "self-sustainable panels on the car", but rather N%, so we keep most everything as-is, except switching all the outside body/chassi panels for solar panels, how much N% could we recover from that? Could it change so someone goes from needing to charge once every 3 days to once every 2 weeks lets say? Together with re-generative breaking, maybe it could at least have some impact.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#60

Post by Moldoteck »

energy123 wrote: post #29
cbmuser wrote: post #7

[flagged]

The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar. That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter. If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Th…

for them prices are kinda similar. Their npp is 2.5bn/unit. But inland construction is banned.
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