You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.
The question here is how to distribute it around the world?
We're going to need a lot of solar panels
161–170 of 842 posts
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money != Wealth You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts. That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones. And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper l…
The communists have repeatedly done the equivalent, which is nationalizing industries. It never, ever produced better results.
Government owned, government built, government run regional monopoly electricity generators in North America are already the absolute cheapest dollars per kilowatt hour in the continent.
It's not communism.
I am referring to hydro quebec, and to the hydroelectric dams in central Washington State.
Would you claim that if we had let the free market build those hydroelectric dams using private capital instead, that we would have better results right now?
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Terraform Industries has a process for converting atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons (particularly "natural" gas), at the cost of a huge amount of electricity. Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper. The author hopes…
Thank you, that is what I gathered, give or take. I guess I was just taken aback by the idea that instead of displacing natural gas we would use more energy to make natural gas. Seems like the ultra-gargantuan investments needed for this kind of transition would be better spent transitioning to a mostly-electric energy economy.
It's not natural gas if you're synthesizing it!
Methane has some significant advantages over electricity: it's storable over time and can be used to fuel vehicles. About a third of the vehicles in this country are methane-fueled, in fact. A CNG tank is a hell of a lot cheaper than a car-sized lithium battery. If you go further and make the methane into kerosene you can fly airplanes with it. Airplanes can't fly while they're plugged into the grid.
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#164You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.
And my 11 year old daughter says that Jeff Bezos could solve world hunger if he just gave away part of his fortune. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way.
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#165The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming mo…
> Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria? I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.
> Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is pure fossil industry propaganda. There is no cadmium in ordinary terrestrial solar panels. The lead, if it’s there at all, is in the solder and easily recovered by a pass through a 300-degree intake process. All of the solar panels installed in California, ever, would easily fit in the parking lot of Dodgers stadium, stacked to a reasonable height. They are non-toxic, insoluble bulk crystalline materials.
"This story has been edited to clarify that panels containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily used in utility-grade applications."
The more important point is that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily not used at all. The PVXchange pricing page stopped quoting prices for thin-film panels years ago because silicon panels are now totally dominant in the market.
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#167We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…
A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor). Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may…
I doubt copper would be used in that kind of thing. It's worse, but not that much worse.
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#168We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…
A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor). Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may…
I'm curious if anyone knows the cost/benefit analysis of HVDC over aluminum cables versus using high-temperature superconductors like ReBCO tape. Maybe supply of yttrium is a bottleneck preventing large-scale use of ReBCO?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#169Can someone point me to a “loss of performance” type formula for solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90° and “sunshine strength” as the sun rises and dips in the sky?
Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…
With bulk PV panels by the pallet already at something like $0.42 per STC watt the majority of a residential or small commercial install is already dominated by the cost of labor and other components. I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to p…
I think the situation is even more extreme than you say.
https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... has €0.43 per watt peak (STC watt) only for high-efficiency panels, the kind you buy when you're tight on space (or the cost of your installation is dominated by the cost of labor, as you say). "Mainstream" is €0.33/Wp and "low cost" is €0.22/Wp.
Also, these costs seem to be much higher as a result of the current supply-chain crisis. The low point so far was August 02020, with high-efficiency panels at €0.30/Wp and low-cost panels at €0.16/Wp. Probably at some point shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even lower than that.