We're going to need a lot of solar panels • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by iso1631 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:20 AM UTC

wheelerof4te wrote: post #464

What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power. To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is. Large wind turbines also nee…

Crops under solar panels: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=planting+under+solar+panel&...

"researchers are showing how panels can increase yields and reduce water use on a warming planet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power

"As of 2020, the total worldwide offshore wind power nameplate capacity was 35.3 gigawatt"

Many areas need large amounts of cheap clean electric, but don't need them 24/7. If your CO2 sequestran or hydrogen generator or desalination only runs during the day, or when the wind is blowing, meh.

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

#472

Post by guerby » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:20 AM UTC

Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around 400 EUR/kWh for 6000 cycles at 80% degrations, that's 0.074 EUR per kWh out the the battery.

5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh.

PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year life.

All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or two electric vehicule charging at home.

As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar production is way lower than the rest of the year.

An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it, if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar + heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity with home sized equipment (yet).

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

#473

Post by brtkdotse » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

badpun wrote: post #465

Roritharr wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house I live in, like everyone's in my street, is from the late 1800s. Insulating those houses from the outside is very expensive, to the tune of 200k, where the house is worth around 500k in the inflated environment we're in. At the very same time, I haven't found a single insurance company willing to insure the house after insulation for insulation related moisture damage. This makes insulating this house an ab…

Interesting, why isn't the moisture on walls behind insulation ever an issue on new construction?

Old constructions are diffusion open, meaning moisture can move freely in and out of it. New constructions are diffusion closed, meaning you have a steam barrier on the inside which blocks the moist indoors air from traveling into the walls. This however requires an airtight house and mechanical ventilation.

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

#474

Post by onli » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:23 AM UTC

yayachiken wrote: post #412

illiac786 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what this person meant is the renewable enthusiasts treat insulation as something easily done whereas it will take 100 years to insulate the majority of houses in Europe in my view…

I know you are just illustrating an opinion and not meaning it literally, but I want to stress how ridiculous your number of 100 years is in reality. The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years. Which means that on average, the house will be torn down and rebuilt after at most 100 years, because additional upkeep would not make economic sense. This means that if you do not chang…

> Not everyone is economically minded and there is no political will (or legal basis) to force these people for their own good.

Not for their own good, but for the common good sure there is a legal basis. Eigentum verpflichtet.

Same direction as mandating solar panels for roofs.

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

#475

Post by jillesvangurp » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

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…

So, the good news is that we can generate all the power we will ever need from the sun using cheap solar panels that will last a very long time.

You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.

Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.

Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.

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

#476

Post by leobg » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

zizee wrote: post #116

leobg wrote: post #79

What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill my house’s tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that something that would be technically feasible today?

Why convert to gas for heating later when you can just store heat itself?* There was an article/discussion here recently about heat batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement at scale. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006791 *This is a rhetorical question, I'm sure everyon…

Sounds great!

I wonder: Why is sand better than the dirt that’s already on site? Dirt, after all, contains water, which I believe should have an even higher thermal capacity, or not?

Also: How about combining this approach with a heat pump instead of resistive heating?

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

#477

Post by ehnto » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #4

We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…

There is another such project going on now, to connect Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector. Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this stage).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...

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

#478

Post by __alexs » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

badpun wrote: post #465

Roritharr wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house I live in, like everyone's in my street, is from the late 1800s. Insulating those houses from the outside is very expensive, to the tune of 200k, where the house is worth around 500k in the inflated environment we're in. At the very same time, I haven't found a single insurance company willing to insure the house after insulation for insulation related moisture damage. This makes insulating this house an ab…

Interesting, why isn't the moisture on walls behind insulation ever an issue on new construction?

Because they use a dual layer construction with an air gap between the inner an outer walls. This gives space for condensation to occur and evaporate again without effecting the living space.

In old buildings with solid walls you can get condensation on the walls that will evaporate because the living space is heated and we'll ventilated. If you clad that wall in insulation you can prevent the evaporation which leads to damp problems.

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

#479

Post by tailsdog » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:28 AM UTC

stewbrew wrote: post #355

dmitriid wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation. With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's . You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.

How is this a tiny detail. We live in a passivhaus. We hardly ever heat. Improving insulation of old houses is an important aspect here. Reducing energy consumption is as important as generating and storing energy.

The point is that in some situations it can be more cost effective to generate additional energy than implement energy saving measures such as insulation improvements. My house was built in the 1600's it's very difficult to insulate properly.

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

#480

Post by abvdasker » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 9:28 AM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #422

MildlySerious wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless. You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away wil…

It's not feasible, because our population is only currently possible due to the availability of energy. We can't have global supply chains, food and medicine moving across the world, much less being produced, without oil and gas. You simply don't reduce energy consumption beyond making TV illegal without starving more than half of the people alive today. It is by no means a solution, that's kind of my point. There is…

Ecofascism is a pretty unimaginative, lazy and downright illogical solution to the complicated problem of climate change. It's also morally and scientifically wrong.