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A valid concern, especially for places that have less than ideal sunlight.
Solar is winning the energy race
141–146 of 146 posts
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#142Are dw writers ok? 2000 people died due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
"There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident, but over 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a preventative measure. Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture." https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#143I 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
almost nobody seems to get this. even if you replace conventional generators with solar, you still have to keep them around (and pay to keep them there) for when the sun is not shining, since there's currently no way to buffer the solar power.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#144I'd love for solar on my house. Unfortunately I live in a wooded valley in the northeast, first, and second, it's extremely expensive in the United States. That means that you can only take advantage of it outside of winter months (since the house will only get a few hours of direct sunlight), and that you need to pay a lot of money to get the panels and the electricals updated for that minimal benefit.
I would have loved it, but I think there's a reason why places like Pakistan has them on every roof, and in the US we're not going in that direction.
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
You're off by an order of magnitude. It's a few hundred watts; an EV is consuming 10s of kilowatts. (Ignore the watt-watt/hour sloppiness, pls.) To charge my car 60% would take about 2 months. Ambient needs (battery cooling) would eat up more than I'd get back. At best it extends idle sit time.
> You're off by an order of magnitude.
How can a question be "off"? :D I literally used N% as to avoid replies like this, but seems you managed anyways...
> To charge my car 60% would take about 2 months.
Depends heavily on where you park and where in the world you live, wouldn't it? I use my car maybe 2-3 hours per week, most of the time it's just standing outside in sunny Spain, would that change the calculation anything?
Re: Solar is winning the energy race
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Totally agree, SI units for the win! I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out! And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
It was the fact you started using units the world knows - albeit misspelling metre - but in the next sentence, comparing that same dimension, you used an apostrophe to allude to a unit that only 5% of the planet uses.