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Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

pv-tech.org

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Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#291

Post by lazide »

onethought wrote: post #279
lazide wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t bet on that plutonium toxicity thing. For one, most reactors aren’t going to have any plutonium (or any other radioisotope) where anyone can touch it or interact with it in any way. Concentrated Hydroflouric acid, and even pure fluorine gas however? That can be an easy turn of a tap away at most semiconductor plants. And much worse. And if you know anything about Florine, ‘much worse’ should be pretty chilling.…

But choosing nuclear power doesn't remove our need for semiconductors, so it's a bit weird to attribute that to solar. The fabrication of of panels is more analogous to fission material mining. As in you are procuring the materials that will produce energy in the future. If we get rid of nuclear power, we don't need to mine those things anymore. If we get rid of solar panels, we still need semiconductors. So I don't…

This is a total non sequiter.

The more semiconductors you make, the more waste chemicals you produce (and use), and the more contamination and cancer you’re going to have if those chemicals aren’t handled correctly. Aka more solar panels, more waste chemicals.

Same with nukes and nuclear waste by running your nuclear plant longer/harder.

90/10 one way will produce a lot of one thing, and less of another - and vice versa.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#292

Post by lolc »

lazide wrote: post #290
lolc wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High ground is beneficial because you have direct line of fire where the enemy hasn't. But there is no ground to hide behind in orbit. So what about this orbiting duck of yours, the power station recently turned rogue? Look, the satellites you share an orbit with are adjusting their trajectories to intercept yours. Undisturbed, they will pose collision hazards within the next days. You must fry them all before they c…

You realize most aimable power systems can also aim sideways, right? And any significant orbital power station is going to have to be pretty big. Or it’s pretty pointless. Which means it’s going to have a lot of mass.

Funny you mention it, the (reinforced?) solar panels will be an obstacle when aiming at other satellites.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#293

Post by eru »

onethought wrote: post #280
roenxi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was 1812; they'd barely discovered how to generate electricity. But note that they describe effects like a persistent dry fog dimming sunlight over NA. That would have an effect on solar production and that was half a world away from the eruption. > The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level. Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talk…

Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't. I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.

Storing throughout the day can be done with batteries locally.

Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#294

Post by roenxi »

onethought wrote: post #280
roenxi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was 1812; they'd barely discovered how to generate electricity. But note that they describe effects like a persistent dry fog dimming sunlight over NA. That would have an effect on solar production and that was half a world away from the eruption. > The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level. Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talk…

Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't. I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.

> or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves

Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here.

I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#295

Post by lazide »

lolc wrote: post #292
lazide wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize most aimable power systems can also aim sideways, right? And any significant orbital power station is going to have to be pretty big. Or it’s pretty pointless. Which means it’s going to have a lot of mass.

Funny you mention it, the (reinforced?) solar panels will be an obstacle when aiming at other satellites.

Sure

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#296

Post by duckmysick »

eru wrote: post #148
duckmysick wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?

You can check some numbers (and sources) at https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

I don't see solar mentioned on this page. And according to data found in a sibling comment, they are practically similar (0.03 nuclear vs 0.02 solar).

Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#297

Post by duckmysick »

scrlk wrote: post #169
duckmysick wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things. This is the first time I've heard of this, so I did a li…

Here's a report from the National Audit Office, which appears to be Prof. Dieter Helm's original source: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po... Part 1.18 (page 22): > "For example, if we assume the government financed the project and required a 2% return (nominal, equivalent to its borrowing cost)..." Part 2.3 (page 27): > "The investors expect their return on the project to be 9.04% over the…

> Also see Figure 19 on page 65, which summarises the different financing options, ranging from 100% state, the actual HPC deal, to 100% private.

Notice how the table of different outcomes shows changes in cost to taxpayers/government, returns, and the strike price. It doesn't show changes to the total construction cost itself, which is presumably fixed no matter what the financing option is. If the grandparent comment was correct, the table would have shown a different construction cost for different financing options.

All that's different is the strike price - which makes sense.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#298

Post by defrost »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #252
defrost wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you've never actually been at sea in the region during the tropical monsoon | the annual cyclone season.

I'll bow to your local knowledge Captain Ahab, but bear in mind that being near the equator both maximises sun and avoids tropical storms. See map for traces of storms: https://reliefweb.int/attachments/da3ff0e6-13fc-311c-b9b1-dd... Bonus challenge, can you find Japan, who are piloting this tech, on that map. They're in there somewhere under the squiggles.

Kick the snark down a few notches and maybe realise that cyclonic storm tracks aren't the limit of rough seas that result.

I don't hunt whales but I do have first hand direct experience of marine engineering in exactly that region.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#299

Post by worthless-trash »

Arbalest wrote: post #254
worthless-trash wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perth time == Singapore time. I bet you're use to living on the east coast.

Central timezone, actually. Perth is not part of the NEM, and pretty sure the plan for this is coming out of the Northern Territory

Yeah, looks like you're right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

I did originally see a graphic which showed somewhere around Broome as the connection point.

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