271–280 of 842 posts
So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981 We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everyth…
I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances
Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
Is there enough silver to make 300 TW capacity of solar panels?
Why don’t we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point that we can store enough energy for everyone
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
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…
The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
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…
Feel free to poke holes in my math:
From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by three below.
They propose using this for natural gas production for home heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have coefficients of power above four, in practice.
So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient; they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it. Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly.
With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand! Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the weekend.)
On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications:
There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just" break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's much better than net zero.
As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have already ramped carbon capture!
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Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore is running power wires to gather solar from Australia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Observed abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20...