Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.
You mean gravity batteries using concrete weights? A scam for suckers.
Solar and batteries can power the world
291–300 of 473 posts
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.
Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available
Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden? EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynam…
Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#294Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear,…
IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
The problem isn't technical dispatchability, it's economic dispatchability. A nuclear plant operated at 5-10% capacity factor would be ludicrously uneconomical, even to just operate.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means w…
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse t…
Unlike the US, Vietnam is a net importer of fuel. It imports over 40 million tons of coal per year:
https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v...
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden? EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynam…
China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up. Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly larg…
Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs. Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us. More importantly, for cobalt a…
Compliance costs are there because the government takes up the burden of accident costs. If the government does that, you can expect the government to then have a say in how things are designed and operated.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough. Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine. Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US. [1] It's not s…
>you can switch the corn use from etanol to food Not that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have factories to deal with it. You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and using it greenhouses to get human feed.
Yellow corn is very popular here in Argentina. Things I ate this or last week:
* Home made popcorn: made from whole yellow corn grains.
* Corn on the cob: Sweet yellow corn. We just learned that you can microwave them for 6 minutes instead of boiling.
* Polenta: Grinded yellow corn. Add milk, butter and as much cheese as possible. You can buy the precooked grinded corn, and it takes less than 5 minutes. Bonus points for a sauce with tomato, onion, peppers, and red chorizo. [1]
* Humita/Tamales: Put some grinded corn wrapped inside the corn husk and boil it. I had not eat them since a long time ago, but they use also yellow corn here. I like it, but it requires a lot of preparation.
We use white corn only for food related to our two independence day:
* Locro: Mix split white hard corn, beans, pumpkin pieces, potatoes, pieces of meat with bone and whatever you can find. Boil it for hours and hours and hours. I probably eat it once or twice a year. [2]
* Mazamorra (porridge?): Mix split white hard corn with sugar and probably milk. Boil it until it's soft, that may take a very long time. I think I eat it once or twice in my life, for some patriotic celebration.
[1] https://www.paulinacocina.net/como-hacer-polenta-con-tuco/25...
[2] https://www.paulinacocina.net/receta-de-locro-argentino/9829
PS: As a rule of thumb, if you want to cook Argentinean food, just look at the site of "Paulina Cocina". She has simple but tasty recipes.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Batteries have gotten so cheap Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product. What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A compa…
In the EU €1800 gets you a 10kWh battery (ex install)
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it down and rebuild.
same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation techniques or blown-in foam because that would make exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the right way to dry out the wood.
Same here... my walls are brick that need to breathe or they will crack and crumble within years if sealed up too tight.
Same goes with the cinder block foundation. If insulated, it moves the freeze/thaw interface inside the block and then you end up with a failing foundation.