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

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

#531

Post by leereeves » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

gibolt wrote: post #109

leereeves wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a couple of studies discussed in [1], solar is cheap, but storage is still expensive. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

For grid scale, batteries add a lot of value. They can pay for themselves rather quickly since they react far quicker than spinning up FF peakers. Real world example, one of the biggest batteries in the world likely will be paid off in 2-3 years: https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-austr...

I suspect those weren't included in the studies because they aren't grid scale yet.

Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world" stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly, so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the grid for one hour).

For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities. And we still don't have enough storage to replace nonrenewables with solar.

Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to replace nonrenewable generation.

But it is a promising technology. If many are built quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten or twenty years.

1: According to the US Energy Information administration, the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

That's about 127 MWh per second.

2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy storage capacity of 553 GWh accounted for 93% of utility-scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-hydro...

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

#532

Post by manmal » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 10:51 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #270

manmal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading that H2 storage is difficult, lossy, and dangerous. H2 gas stations have blown up every now and then. Has that changed?

Hydrogen can be stored underground (and is), just like natural gas. This is much cheaper per unit energy storage capacity than storing energy in batteries.

AFAIK H2 is way more difficult to contain than natural gas, as the molecules are so tiny. Very hard to build a container that doesn't continuously leak the gas.

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

#533

Post by yayachiken » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 10:52 AM UTC

illiac786 wrote: post #455

yayachiken wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years Source? Counter examples: my house is built 1908. Lots of other houses built around the same time in the area I live in. My parents live in a house from 1749. The entire village where they live is made of houses built 200+ years ago, it's written on the house in general, hence easy to check. Hence I very much stand by my prediction it…

> Source?

Assuming an economic lifetime of 70 to 100 years for new buildings is industry practice based on standards like DIN 276. You can find those numbers (with some variation) on pretty much every web page dealing with economics of building, for example here: https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge...

You can also approximately extrapolate that number from the source I have given you. (Which is based on a survey by the federal government of Germany) If approximately 50-60% of houses are older than 50 years, then assuming a approximately linear to progressive attrition curve you will get a number around 100 for the average lifetime.

Of course a long tail exists, but 1. I was talking about economic costs, people might just like their houses and renovate even though it is financially not worth it, and 2. after 100 years the historical protection (Denkmalschutz) gets more and more relevant and is a whole different set of regulations.

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

#534

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

bogdanu wrote: post #524

illiac786 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years Source? Counter examples: my house is built 1908. Lots of other houses built around the same time in the area I live in. My parents live in a house from 1749. The entire village where they live is made of houses built 200+ years ago, it's written on the house in general, hence easy to check. Hence I very much stand by my prediction it…

Europe is a big continent, even EU is so diverse. A lot of people in Eastern Europe live in apartments and houses that can be insulated extremely cheap. There are even EU or government programs that make it affordable.

It's not really "extremely cheap" and probably only refers to covering old buildings with external insulation.

Most of the Soviet-era panel apartment blocks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_building) have extremely shitty internal insulation, too. So you end up heating your neighbors, the street, the elevator shafts, stairwells etc.

You can't really fix that without extremely costly renovations.

Khrusschchyovkas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka) are marginally better due to materials used, but they are 50 years past their demolition date by now, and will be also very expensive to retrofit.

There is also an insane number of new construction in the past 30 years. Perhaps for the in-EU Eastern European countries regulations and standards work. Everywhere else it's "whatever we build, as cheaply as possible"

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

#535

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:01 AM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #512

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…

> it will take 100 years to insulate the majority of houses in Europe Citation needed. This number is absurd.

500 million people.

So, around 200 million or so households. Each household (even if it's an apartment) needs both external and internal insulation improved.

Same goes for things like stores, factories, schools, government buildings, and all other non-residential buildings.

Most buildings are built before new energy standards (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/eu-buildings-factsheets_en). In some countries (esp. the Eadtern block) you probably need to teardown old buildings because you can't just simply insulate them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202169)

I'd say "100 years" is a conservative estimation

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

#536

Post by pcdoodle » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #518

Helmut10001 wrote: post #320

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…

Places without enough sun in the winter, and without enough wind, too, sometimes, will just import power. You might be able to draw down on HVDC transmission lines. But there will also be abundant solar farms in the tropics synthesizing ammonia for export. If the weather prediction says not enough wind, and your tanked ammonia would run low, and you can't book enough transmission line power, you just order a shipment…

I had no idea ammonia had such properties, any recommended readings/video?

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

#537

Post by cabby » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #456

brtkdotse wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual insulation is stupid cheap when you look at the ROI. However, installing in on an existing house is really tricky and you can cause a lot of moisture related damage if you do it in the wrong way.

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…

Have you looked at hempcrete? I'm in France and have just started looking at better insulation for an old stone large property.

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

#538

Post by yayachiken » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #474

yayachiken wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I mean with legal basis is that the laws do not exist yet.

The constitution would allow these laws, even to the point of expropriation. But as long as the laws do not exist there is no legal basis to act on.

In case of conflict, there are some court rulings already, for example the highest court recently ruled that you may infringe on the neighbors property, if you need to insulate your walls in such a way that the thicker walls would then be on the neighbours property.

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

#539

Post by leereeves » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #330

leereeves wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a couple of studies discussed in [1], solar is cheap, but storage is still expensive. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

You can easily run a grid on 60% renewables with essentially no storage at all. We have a long way to go before 60% of the world's primary power consumption is switched to renewables.

But if you drive most non-renewables out of business in the process, you'll have a lot of outages at night.

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

#540

Post by Kon5ole » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 11:28 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #231

kragen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day by using a daily thermal store. Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.

The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.

But how do you consider "full system costs" for something that needs people to manage the waste for 1000+ years even after you have closed the plant?

We can evidently not even predict inflation correctly from one month to the next so it seems unlikely that we can know what a nuclear plant actually costs.

France has certainly not known, they're currently over 40 billion dollars in debt for their plants (to be paid by taxpayers when they nationalize the operator), and they have over a million cubic meters of waste that needs manpower to manage for longer than France has existed as a nation.

Instead of nuclear plants in 0.1% of the Sahara, I propose solar panels on 10% of existing parking lots. Much easier, much faster, much cheaper, and coming generations will thank us instead of curse us. :)

//crashoverrideCIA ;)