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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

#311

Post by Syonyk »

walrus01 wrote: post #159
Retric wrote: post #149

Earlier 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…

It should run you about $0.75/W to install them and hook them in for a grid tie system, maybe a hair more. Interestingly, that's the same for roof mount (with rapid shutdown) or ground mount (without rapid shutdown). Costs vary slightly depending on what you're doing in terms of panel orientation and inverter DC:AC ratio (if it's not 1.2 or greater, add more panels).

This project (CO2 to CH4) would benefit from maximum raw production per panel, if you can ramp the plants up and down, so aim them south. I've been deploying, both for my solar and for some other residential projects I'm helping with, east-west facing panels, to get production up as early in the morning as possible and run it late. You get less kWh per panel than south facing, but you get a system that, on a good day, is producing from sunup to sundown, even when those set far north of east/west. Out here, peak days are almost 45 degrees north of E/W for sunrise/sunset.

Iron Ridge XR1000 and some locally welded frames work pretty darn well for this sort of thing, if you have the ground area for it.

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

#312

Post by asveikau »

edrxty wrote: post #195
mgerdts wrote: post #60

There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details. > Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas. Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power c…

Tangential but hits on google isn't really a metric for...anything at all. For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.

Here we go, a other person in the tank for big potato ...

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

#314

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

amelius wrote: post #197
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…

Ban advertising, and let the world go back to yellow pages. A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.

Not sure why this is downvoted.

Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.

Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.

I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.

Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.

Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?

Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.

The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.

I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.

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

#315

Post by pfdietz »

Retric wrote: post #300
pfdietz wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but land costs for example aren’t dropping. In the US, land is widely available at around $1000/acre. The current cost to cover that with PV is around $100,000/acre (depending on the fill factor). So, land costs are not a substantial obstacle to reduction in the cost of PV energy.

Land is just an example, running new HV power lines from ultra cheap land to consumers is another cost that’s not dropping. If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10% annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.

Or, you know, we move industry out to be closer to the PV fields. Globally, energy intensive industry probably moves to places like Chile with very high insolation. Too bad, Europe.

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

#316

Post by sbierwagen »

xbmcuser wrote: post #308
sbierwagen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're doing carbon sequestration you skip the part where you convert it to methane and just sequester the captured CO2. Given the scale of the problem, something like that will (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a political solution, eventually every current natural gas well will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were. However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture,…

If they make it profitable to get carbon out of the air which this suggests it will get a lot of private investments. This will also make carbon worth something so instead of letting it out in the atmosphere there will be effort to capture and sell it to the solar methane generators.

GP asked about sequestration. Most of the productive economic uses for CH4 require burning it. Liquid synfuels are great and wonderful but they are carbon neutral!

You can use atmospheric CO2 as feedstock for plastic production, but world plastic production is only 380 million tonnes a year, while there's more than 1 trillion tonnes of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take two and a half millennia to convert that to plastic.

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

#317

Post by opo »

walrus01 wrote: post #234
Retric wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rooftop solar is far more expensive than solar put on land. The cost of rooftop solar (particularly homeowner solar) is usually hidden by implementing a big subsidy to wealthy consumers that is paid for by less wealthy consumers - sort of a reverse robin hood scheme.

We are well past the point where anyone can argue we should subsidize rooftop solar because we need to help build a fledgling industry - yet I see solar advocates continue to advocate for this wealth transfer from the poor to the well off.

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

#318

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

pfdietz wrote: post #274
taf2 wrote: post #132

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

Because they are too expensive and take too long to build. One gets much more CO2 reduction per $, and much more quickly, from spending on renewables.

Regulated one to be too expensive, subsidized the other to be cheap.

The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of education, and three small scope issues that range from unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made nuclear too expensive to be viable.

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

#319

Post by zbrozek »

NavinF wrote: post #303
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.

Can confirm. Rates are 64% higher than the US average and 100% higher than a lot of states. I wonder what they do with all this money.

US average kWh is 14.77 cents while PG&E TOU-C starts at 37.460 and goes up to 48.902. So it's worse than you list.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

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

#320

Post by Helmut10001 »

People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert.

I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).

Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.

So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).

.. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].

[1]: https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX

[2]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/

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