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We're going to need a lot of solar panels

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Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#231

Post by acidburnNSA »

kragen wrote: post #219
acidburnNSA wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd have to use dry cooling in that environment. A bit more cost but fully doable. You can reject 375 degreeC core heat even in the Sahara

True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day by using a daily thermal store. Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.

The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#232

Post by WalterBright »

rfrey wrote: post #221
WalterBright wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All that lost value could have gone to line their pockets, but instead it’s being used for the good of society That is indeed the pitch the communists make. How is that working out for them?

It's working out great for the communist governments of Quebec and Washington State. The communists in Norway also seem to be doing ok.

The communists in Norway, like Russia, benefit enormously from pumping oil out of the ground, which goes to the government. In Norway's case, it's 20% of the GDP. Probably much more today with all the oil price increases.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#233

Post by sdenton4 »

WalterBright wrote: post #220
zbrozek wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the evening, and really expensive at night.

> really expensive during the day Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.

PG&E also has to pay for occasionally burning half the state.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#234

Post by walrus01 »

Retric wrote: post #202
bryanlarsen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's law will eventually stop, too. But people have been predicting the end for 50 years and it still looks like it has at least another 10 to go. It seems quite clear that solar costs will continue to drop exponentially until the end of the decade, which is all the author's assumptions need. Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in oth…

The article suggested local production, good luck buying land anywhere close to NYC at 100$/acre. Mores law also failed several times. More revised his initial 1965 estimate for a doubling every year in 1975. He predicted various doubling rates with the weakest form being transistors on a single chip every 2 years starting in 1980. So, it’s current form isn’t an exponential increase in density but in terms of transis…

You're definitely not going to power all of NYC by rooftop solar, but also look at the size of the warehouse roofs (empty, no solar) in NJ just across the river, and out on long island. And Staten island. Etc.

Empty land is not necessarily a requirement.

Parking lot per-row shade structures that integrate PV panels on top are also a thing now, and there are sure a shitload of parking lots in NJ and out on long island.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#235

Post by kragen »

walrus01 wrote: post #34
bequanna wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation? Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.

realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline supplies. if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, m…

> if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime.

This sounds like ⓐ a plausible reason for the Libyan government to refuse any such project; ⓑ a good reason for the Spanish and French to ally with the Libyan government (puppet or otherwise) against the Germans and Italians, or the Germans and Spanish to ally with them against the Italians and French, or whatever; ⓒ unstable after a few decades, when Europe's own military forces are no longer overwhelmingly larger than Libya's.

(Don't think ⓒ can happen in Libya? The Eight-Nation Alliance didn't think it could happen in China either.)

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#236

Post by toolz »

mmaunder wrote: post #153

The 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…

> The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem

Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?

If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)

Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#237

Post by kragen »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #231
kragen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day by using a daily thermal store. Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.

The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.

Maybe, we'll see. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't seem to agree with you, even though the capacity factor of PV in the PRC is absolutely abysmal.

The figures I've seen suggest that the capex cost of a coal power plant — which is basically a nuclear power plant without the nuclear reactor — is high enough to be uncompetitive with PV in most of the world now, even if the coal were free. So I'm skeptical that GE or CGN has found a way to make their nuclear power plants as cheap as PV, except in, like, Manchuria or Svalbard or something.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#238

Post by shusaku »

whimsicalism wrote: post #95
metalliqaz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported using our existing infrastructure...

This is Hacker News, not "Hackers who read the article News"

“I had a preconceived notion about the article, control-f searched for it, didn’t find it, so I wrote a comment”

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#239

Post by azinman2 »

Given all of the factors involved to manufacture the capacity the author is talking about (we'll ignore labor & land costs to install), wouldn't it be better to put that into cheaper/safer/smaller nuclear power? It already runs 24/7 with no CO2.

Re: We're going to need a lot of solar panels

#240

Post by jvanderbot »

walrus01 wrote: post #4

We'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…

Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of the meat here.

> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."

Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.

> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.

> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "

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