Are dw writers ok? 2000 people died due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
There is a lot of FUD regarding nuclear power in Germany, don't be surprised.
Solar is winning the energy race
131–140 of 146 posts
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that. Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc. There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped bac…
> cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order He is going to pay them $1B to drop their plans: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/23/g-s1-114868/trump-totalenergi...
Only if they give that money to the fossil fuel industry ... bit of an important detail in the context of US energy subsidies and thumbs on scales.
Environmental groups denounced the deal as an alternate way to block wind projects, with one group calling it a "billion-dollar bribe" to kill clean energy.
"After losing again and again in court on his illegal stop-work orders, Trump has found another way to strangle offshore wind: pay them to walk away," said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action.Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#133Might 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?
Hyundai had this https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/23/hyundai-sonata-hybrid-roof...
> After baking in the sun all day, the car can add 3-4 miles to its range.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#134Solar 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 o…
> 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.
Isn't that exactly backwards of what you'd naively expect? Peak regulatory dysfunction.
Are these mandated systems capable of operating in the event of a grid outage? I understand that a lot of US installs cheap out on the necessary component.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#135I try to be optimistic but don't extrapolate prematurely. The problem is not solar but storage and is not solved yet. I suppose the time will come that we will have to sacrifice part of the cheap solar energy to produce efuels or similar for our winters, transportation etc
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#136I 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.
There's the theory and there's the real world
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
To make the math more complicated, you could theoretically have an unfoldable solar roof. Say you have cute, tiny one-person car with trunkspace for two bags of groceries, call that 1/9 the footprint of a "normal" car, and give it an expanding roof that can fill up a typical parking space. So you get to multiply the numbers by 9, which would mean a 10-minute drive to the neighborhood grocery store would require 60/9…
> To make the math more complicated, you could theoretically have an unfoldable solar roof. This is not completely theoretical, this guy did it on his Tesla: https://www.dartsolar.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes... I doubt that it will go mainstream, since you can only unfold it when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack for aerodynamics and weight.…
I would point out this guy: https://youtu.be/ZDByoLRS9QA
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#138[flagged]
The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment. I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied. Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector. The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it…
I was speaking to a Kuwaiti princeling a few years ago about solar and he just couldn’t get his head around zero marginal cost, the efficiency of assembly of the panels, and the economics that would drive the growth. We spoke for about half an hour and he kept bringing up that powerbrokers don’t care about the environment and I had to repeatedly point out that I hadn’t mentioned the environment once.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a good question, but the reality is the energy required to power a car is far larger than what you can collect. The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter. A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft? Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW. To convert that to a mor…
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter. > A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft? We must think metric, every inch of the way! Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions. I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface…
There is a tiny image hidden at the bottom on one of the race team pages which represents an interesting effort towards a road legal solar car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNSW_Sunswift#/media/File:Suns...
They are now working on the sunswift 8 which is to be a combination of solar battery and hydrogen.
They are not calling it a solar car anymore apparently.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/challeng/vertically-integrated-proje...
Pure solar is indeed to much of a constraint, it make it more challenging than propelling humans over roads in an enclosure needs to be.
A big problem is sharing the road with conventional vehicles. Many could probably drive straight though it, a Tesla could probably drive straight though it.
If the car must be a strong metal container the choices quickly reduce to the things on the market right now.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#140Only if you front load a lot of regulatory and fictitious “externality” costs onto the alternatives.