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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

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Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#561
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent point, and one I hadn't really internalized. Thank you.

Instructive to read up on the 2022 Sri Lanka protests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Sri_Lankan_protests Debt crisis and sharp spikes in fuel and oil costs resulted in shortages of both. Also shortages of fertilizer. Which resulted in shortages of food. If I was a Sri Lankan politician I wouldn't want a repeat of that.

The Sri Lankan politicians like "Mr. 10%" were largely in it for the gift. The debt crisis could have been prevented if they followed IMF recommendations in the first place.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion. Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life. At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this p…

It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip effic…

The idea that we'll have huge excesses of clean energy seems like wishful thinking. We may have issues with excess energy at certain times of day for sure. But intermittent excesses like that are difficult to make use of economically because of capital costs and low utilisation. A general excess would be countered by falling energy prices to the point that it's difficult to make a business case for new installations.

I don't see a future where technologies which are massively inefficient reach their break even cost before other energy intensive activities or more efficient grid scale storage soak up the excess.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.

Ah yes, what Europe needs once more is to become existentially dependent on a region that is both culturally and geographically distant and where Europe has very little ability to enforce and police it's interests. Have we learned nothing from the 2022 energy crisis? The number of starry eyed suggestions here about distributed worldwide power networks and load balancing is astonishing given the realities that we actu…

Yep pretty much stupid.

The best interpretation you can give is that they are naive idealists, stuck in the mental state of a kid (even though their intelligence is fully developed).

But as I'm getting older, I'm more inclined to say that they are clearly stupid, some form of "intellectual yet idiot".

I always roll my eyes when I read that ultra optimistic report about renewables because it doesn't really match reality. Not only do they always grossly exaggerate the benefits but they also systematically bury the problems that have to be solved for it to be a long-term solution (manufacturing in a sovereign way, recycling and grid balancing are largely unsolved problems).

And then you have idiots who come in and propose some grandiose "solution" that would require multiple countries/culture to not only collaborate economically but also accept de facto power imbalance and stuff like that. It's almost like believing in Santa; but it's cute up to a 10-year-old, after that it's more hopeless than anything else.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else. It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else. It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a…

If that is a miracle so is every engineering and scientific effort because most things are hard multifaceted problems. Maybe these aren’t actually miracles but the inevitable products of structured teams of trained people.

That's like saying "The Great Wall of China is just like any other garden wall."

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#565
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries. Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives. I'm actually somewhat co…

You may have seen that Colombian drug cartels are already using Starlink-piloted "sea drones" to do ocean-based shipping through blockades. The US Coast Guard estimates that 90% of crewed narcosubs get through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0

The autonomous boat got intercepted on a test run.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#566
post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental disagreement here is (in my opinion) on what needs to be encouraged. If what you say is true and renewables are cheaper anyway, then also as you say capitalism should in out and that's what we will use in the near term anyway. So shouldn't we be investing more now on the things that you think are 10-20 years out, in order to accelerate them? Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and…

>And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. You should be less skeptical. With a LCOE difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in extra storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper. That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and win…

Where are you getting a LCOE diff of 5x? The latest Lazard's is 2x.

Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle.

Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as expensive as it could be. There is infinite room to improve the economies of scale and unit economics of nuclear; not so much for solar.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#567
post #347

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment. Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage. https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

The article notes several examples of reduced use of fossil fuels: > California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023 > total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased > kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter

Yes but it's a lie of sorts. It's only reduced at the local level in some specific places on earth. What's more the local reduction has NECESSARILY been linkend to an increase in fossil fuel use to actually build, transport and install the panels. That's not even talking about the energy used for extraction of the primary ressources used to build the stuff.

Until we can figure out how to use solar to actually power the industrial processes necessary to build/recycle/maintain it, it's mostly a lure, a stop gap at best. And to be able to do that you would need to have an industrial policy with strong rules inside the countries using the solar.

But it's all very convenient to lie about it, as if we are doing something meaningful, it's part of the inbuilt duplicity omnipresent in today's society, that derive from female virtuous posturing/behavior.

And as the parent noted, in the case of reduction of fossil fuel use that is necessary at the global level because the effect of climate change is not localized, solar doesn't meaningfully change anything yet. In fact, it allows us to just consume more energy while still putting out as much CO2 as before and actually even more. Global fossil fuel consumption has not reduced one bit; it's extremely hypocritical to have various countries around the world increase their consumption to be able to say that there was a decrease at some specific localisation.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#568
post #182
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out? Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30.…

Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.

Can you build an industrial plant to build the panels only using solar power?

How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor?

If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#569
post #464

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Transmission lines are a interesting idea, but expensive. Once solar is cheap (like now, as it already is), you can put in 3x what is needed on a sunny day, and power everything on cloudy days. Solar runs on cloudy days. Night obviously requires a different solution. Start by installing solar over all parking lots. To think that you won't be able to run a 100% solar/wind grid is a bet against human ingenuity. If gene…

I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).

Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#570
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a long time to build. they're also designed to deliver constant output (i don't know how fast they can de-/increase output), so if power prices get into negative territory due to overwhelming solar output, nuclear power plants might have to operate at a loss, making its product comparably expensive. there are environmental factors (need for water sources for cooling),…

I so much hope that we (the world) replace thermal plants (except geothermal) with nuclear ones. But yeah there is a lot of resistance and it is very expensive.

i too hope we soon replace all fossil fuel plants with alternatives, but i don't think it'll be nuclear, for the reasons given above.

there'll probably be an increase of solar and wind for many more years, as they're a safe bet - cheap, low maintenance and you don't need much skilled human labor to operate it.

additionally, battery storage will be become ever cheaper and more ubiquitous. together with traditional storage options, like water. we'll see how far that gets us.

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