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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

#541

Post by katkatkatkatket »

tuatoru wrote: post #393
katkatkatkatket wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km, comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each, and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them, that's 2e5 truck loads. The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.

OK, but that's just an organisation problem. The technology exists.

If it's not economically or practically feasible, then no, the technology doesn't exist.

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

#542

Post by adrianN »

leereeves wrote: post #539
adrianN wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Germany runs on about 50% renewable electricity and doesn't have outages at night.

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

#543

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

adrianN wrote: post #333
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be more specific? Because battery energy storage barely works for houses and you can't build pump storage everywhere. Then there are few prototypes like Power-To-Gas which has promising prospect and rest is in level of sci-fi

Power to gas, as you mention, would be sufficient. There are also some interesting battery chemistries in the pipeline, like iron-air batteries. How about we keep building renewables at a rapid pace until we actually have enough to need storage? Until then we have time to improve storage technology and build some electrolyzers (we'll need lots of Hydrogen anyway for industrial purposes).

We need storage now as we are burning coal and gas as replacement for energy storage.

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

#544

Post by katkatkatkatket »

geertj wrote: post #387
katkatkatkatket wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert? The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is ar…

Any such system would probably use DC, which would be much more compact than what you describe.

Find me a comparable DC link (5GW * 100, 3000k+ miles). To overcome I^2 losses, a DC system would need an even higher voltage, and we're already talking about a 1000kv AC system.

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

#545

Post by katkatkatkatket »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #383
katkatkatkatket wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert? The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is ar…

We wouldn't want to import all our electricity from one country anyway, even if that country wasn't quite as unstable as Libya. A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.

What would be the point? Even getting 5% of our power from desert solar would be astronomically expensive, and a logistical and political problem of historic proportions. All for a tiny fraction of our power usage. Just build nuclear!

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

#546

Post by Ekaros »

robertlagrant wrote: post #515
midasuni wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.K. the people who want renewables tend to be under 40s that can’t afford to buy a house. Those that actively don’t want renewables tend to own their own home and may have a couple the let out.

Pretty much no-one actively doesn't want renewables. They might not want them built very near them, but that's different.

I'm not against them, but I think they should not be specially subsidised. Just pay what ever the market rate at the moment is. If it is not enough to cover investment too bad.

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

#547

Post by Epa095 »

guerby wrote: post #462
Helmut10001 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, it is cheaper though to "sell" the electricity in summer and "buy" it back in winter (even if it is at 10x the price I sold it for). Compared to private long term storage solutions. Most long term electricity storage solutions will yield electricity at prices above 80c/kWh here (even lithium ion is currently around 50 to 70c, if you calculate 10,000 hrs average lifetime of house batteries). And you cannot…

Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around 400 EUR/kWh, here an example of a 5.12 kWh for 2100 EUR: https://www.europe.sokbattery.com/product-page/sok-battery-1... These are rated for 6000 cycles to 80% degration, so if we take an average of 90% assuming linear degration we will be able to output 6000 by 0.9 so 5400 kWh for each kWh of battery capacity before the battery reaches 80% of its origin…

Your calculations are interesting for day to day peak shaving, but as you noted yourself, these batteries are way to expensive for seasonal storage. Depending on the insulation on your house, one of those would maybe contain enough power for 0.3-1 hour of power-use in the winter.

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

#548

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

If you're on a farm, then vertical bi-facial aligned west/east, or even north/south, or some mix, can radically shift the power output as required.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S26669552220002...

The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per day.

Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has benefits at their latitude too.

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

#549

Post by JohnHaugeland »

cinntaile wrote: post #470
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The catch is that power-to-gas tech described in the article isn't real

The Sabatier reaction has been known since 1897. The Wiki article also gives some examples of Power-to-gas systems that were built, so I don't know why you claim it's not real. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Ah, yes, a reaction.

Can you show me this actually in use literally anywhere on earth for this job, 125 years later?

Where would I go to buy some atmosphere derived gasoline?

You're confusing that something could theoretically be done with that it's a real thing that can be relied on today at scale to save the planet

If this was a real, practical thing, it would be in use. We fight wars over this stuff.

If the thing you want to use to save the world hasn't been done at scale, you probably can't get it there in the ten years we have left.

In all of history, only one of these has ever been made at the megawatt scale. Audi built one in 2013. They took it down three years later because it didn't actually work. It was supposed to provide fuel for 1300 cars, but it couldn't produce 1/10 of what it was supposed to

Yes, I see that you can find things in search engines

No: this is not a real option for saving us from climate change

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

#550

Post by Symmetry »

In the US at least I think it would be better to describe the rate at which we add solar to the grid as limited by regulatory and grid management issues. The backlog of projects waiting to be approved, in terms of capacity, is about as large as the currently installed solar capacity. One problem here is figuring out the transmission issues related to adding new capacity, so it's not just a purely regulatory issue, but the way in which grid capacity is added assumed new plants would look more like coal plants so there are regulatory aspects to it.

But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about any of that.

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