World's economy and based on oil and gas and It is not easy to switch to an alternative. Because it will also mean to change all the geopolitical relations around the globe
Solar and batteries can power the world
451–460 of 473 posts
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
15kWh 48V LFP battery around $1800 with low quality battery management system in metal box on wheels. Car batteries need more expensive inverters if you want to fast charge them (150kW-950kW) and super fast discharge them while driving fast (>100 kW). Thus my 600kW extender comes to almost $62000 for vans and small trucks. Cheaper if installed as house battery. The Mercedes eSprinter 56kW van costs around $80000 new…
Wait, you put 600kWh of batteries on a sprinter van?!? I wanna know more...that's insane (base eSprinter is like ~115 kWh, right?)
eSprinter 2022 is 56kWh. In Europe I'm limited in the size of a battery by the total legal weight of van and it's trailer combined. So I can not tow more weight than 600KWh LFP batteries with this particular van. But with $0.01 cost per kWh it only cost $60 (52,08 Euro) for a full charge, good for 2000 km (Amsterdam to southern Spain). So even though I carry 5.5-6 times as much weight as a small city car around, it cost me a lot less than having a tiny battery and charging at commercial chargers with $0.40-$0.90 fees per kWh. And a lot less than gasoline (benzine) or diesel.
Also the larger battery means the individual cells can be pulse charged much slower and each cell individually at the rate where it doesn't damage that much. I measure the temperature, voltage and current of each cell so they never overheat. This is how I get many more cycles out of each cell so they last 50 years. It is also safer, with thousands of temperature measurements several times per second not a single sell gets warm, and if they ever do it is because it is damaged and we can immediately disconnect it and tell the driver where to locate it and remove it.
For a truck these thousands of battery cells discharging slowly in parallel becomes the reason all trucking companies will be forced to switch from diesel to electric, it is several times cheaper per mile or km. Lower energy cost, lower maintainace, lower downtime, longer life. The only thing you would want is that the maximum weight limit per truck goes up so you can ship more per trip. Right now you ship little kilo's if you carry a heavy battery. But charging with your own solar at home base is so much cheaper that it is worth to do two trips versus 1 trip with diesel.
The reason electric trucks are not yet everywhere is that the truck makers ask ridiculous amounts for battery cells that are still wired in series and discharged too fast to last long. Simply bad design. We need a disruptive electric truck startup and we need a disruptive battery startup. Investors welcome...
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs. Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers. https://en.wikipedia.or…
>The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs. What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm equipment off ethanol if…
> What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly.
It's really not when you compare it to the energy return you get from energy invested in other forms of energy generation. Solar power, for example, is typically estimated to produce 13x as much energy as it takes to make the panel. This is obviously a considerable improvement over 1.3x.
So why does it matter as long as the net energy output is positive? Because the whole point of the energy generating exercise is to do something with the output energy other than just make more energy and there isn't unlimited capacity on the input side of the equation. The 100 "free" gallons you get in the example sounds great, but sustaining that requires inputting (i.e. growing) 300 gallons worth, so you need to produce 400 gallons total to get 100 useful gallons. Looking at the math another way, an ethanol powered civilization would spend 75% of the energy it produces simply producing more energy, leaving only 25% to actually do anything useful with. This is bad, because said civilization will run out land to grow corn for ethanol well before it's generating enough useful energy.
It's sort of like the energy equivalent of the food explanation for why it took human civilization so long to advance out of the agrarian stage. Up until relatively recently, most humans spent most of their time and effort simply growing enough food to live. This left very little excess capacity for humans to do anything to move humanity forward. In the modern day, very little of our time and energy goes into growing food, leaving all sorts of extra capacity to build spaceships and AI and the Internet and whatever else. But only because we got really efficient at growing food.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again opportunity costs. It almost always makes sense to spend the money on the most efficient means to achieve the goal. Money spent paying farmers and ethanol refiners to inefficiently produce 25% lower carbon fuel could instead be directed at other endeavours that for the same cost reduce carbon emissions more.
The difference is we already grow corn at scale beyond market need. Probably less has to be paid in that effort than starting up some other industry. Which still can be done along side the corn shouldering the load until that industry reaches the scale of the corn industry's waste product.
> Probably less has to be paid in that effort than starting up some other industry.
No, that's the entire point. As mentioned above, for ethanol you input the equivalent of 300 ethanol gallons worth of energy (which could also be ethanol) to get 100 net gallons out you can do whatever you want with. If you instead used that 300 gallons worth of input to produce solar panels, they'd produce 3,600 net gallons worth of equivalent energy over their lifetime. You get 36x more net energy building solar panels than growing corn for ethanol. Sure, you could spend 600 gallons worth of energy and do both, but then you'd still be better off switching the entire 600 gallons of input to solar panels until you run out of solar panel generation capacity or demand. That's the opportunity cost.
Also a minor point worth making is that ethanol is in no way a "waste product" from the corn growing industry that would otherwise go to, well, waste. Farmers aren't just growing a bunch of extra corn for no reason that we can conveniently use for ethanol. If demand for ethanol stopped, they'd stop growing all that extra corn.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#455Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
Kinda funny how we invented a carbon neutral fuel system but we are like "lets only use it as a 15% mix" vs trying to design new engines for pure ethanol. You could fuel your car with hooch you made from yard waste.
Not unless your yard was ~5 acres and you did nothing with that land but grew corn for ethanol. And even if you could do that, there's nowhere near enough "yard' for every car out there. The math just doesn't math.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs. What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm equipment off ethanol if…
> What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. It's really not when you compare it to the energy return you get from energy invested in other forms of energy generation. Solar power, for example, is typically estimated to produce 13x as much energy as it takes to make the panel. This is obviously a considerable improvement over 1.3x. So why does it matter as long a…
Yeah, but market pricing fluctuates and that corn (hopefully) isn't grown in a monocrop. Alternating with soybean affects protein and food oils markets, and alternating or adding industrial hemp both, plus tremendous fibre.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Dent corn doesnt make popcorn nor can you eat it as sweet corn, it is a corn optimized for starch. If you want to eat it directly you must put a nixtamalization process on it or it doesn't have much nutritional value. Typically it's processed into starch process, or turned into fuel or fructose.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dent_corn
> Dent corn is the variety used in food manufacturing as the base ingredient for cornmeal flour (used in the baking of cornbread), corn chips, tortillas, and taco shells. It is also used to make corn syrup.
After a quick search, you need "flint" corn instead of "dent" corn for polenta (it appears to be similar to grits). I guess in case of an emergency anyone is better than nothing.
Also, it would be much easier to switch if the people has the know-how. (I'm worried about the availability of enough seeds of the other corn.)
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#458It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy. [1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
That's a very silly way to compare energy usage. For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion. Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel. Similar t…
I don't see why anyone would balk at the idea of using backwards compatible fuel sources, synthesized using a sustainable process powered by solar energy.
Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from?
What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power.
The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is only marginally better in the scheme of things. They want to take farms for food out of commission in some places to replace with fragile and unreliable solar systems. Imagine installing this stuff on a large scale. If you plan to replace all the panels after 30 years and incur no losses from high winds, hail, vandals, etc., then you would need to overbuild the system by 20% at minimum. This is assuming moder…
That's a lot of guessing though, newer panels might as well be more durable and longer lasting. Even if you lose 20% in 20-30 years you don't need to replace the panel unless the cost of replacing them can be recouped within a reasonable amount of years. As long as there is more space for more panels you don't need to replace existing ones unless they stop working, so capacity just increases for decades until you rea…
The real estate would be more valuable than the panels, presumably. So it's not like they can just keep expanding forever. As for the vulnerabilities, this is not based on guessing. We've produced solar panels in the West even recently. They are not competitive with China on cost. They are actually fragile. We are facing geopolitical challenges.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions. We need mundane home DC solutions.
There's https://currentos.org/ working on it.
Thank you for sharing! that's an interesting project.