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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

#591

Post by pydry »

robertlagrant wrote: post #517
pydry wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

They want new housing but often built by the government instead of evil property developers.

Private property developers simply dont want to build affordable housing. The margins are just lower than they are for luxury housing. Who would choose to make 4% profit when you could make 20?

They do lobby hard to remove building regulations in the name of building more affordable housing but they never actually build it unless local government actively forces them to with some of those regulations they hate, at which point they build the bare minimum and install a poor door.

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

#592

Post by pfdietz »

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…

> What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.

We don't realize it because it's not true.

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

#593

Post by jonnycomputer »

bartwe wrote: post #486
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…

Sounds like the next step should be long-term at-home storage through generation of solid or liquid fuels.

Given the increasing duck-curve [https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-solar-power-duck-c...] of solar energy production, this makes sense to me, economics and efficiency concerns aside.

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

#594

Post by rocqua »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #345
pfdietz wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world powered by PV will be mostly powered by larger scale ground mounted PV, not by PV on the roofs of homes and businesses.

But roof PV makes the grid more resilient, requires less grid, and the owners more independent. A huge portion of consumer electricity could be served with rooftop. It should scale with hot sunny days for A/C surges. It may be key to not overloading the grid with true mass market BEV adoption. And the article seems to miss that wind is still beating solar from the LCOE charts I've seen. They keep making the towers ta…

In Europe, roof PV is actually making the grid worse off when residential areas become over-producers. The capacity is not available to move the peak solar power away from residential areas or between residential areas. The grid is apparently designed for top down generation.

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

#595

Post by tedk-42 »

pfdietz wrote: post #315
Retric wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land is just an example, running new HV power lines from ultra cheap land to consumers is another cost that’s not dropping. If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10% annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.

Or, you know, we move industry out to be closer to the PV fields. Globally, energy intensive industry probably moves to places like Chile with very high insolation. Too bad, Europe.

This is wrong. Steel manufacturing happens near ports.

We can't shift cities to electricity generation. We historically choose population centres in places with optimal conditions like having good water flow or natural protection with mountain ranges or good level land.

Most industry needs access to transport with shipping being the cheapest.

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

#596

Post by rocqua »

pydry wrote: post #489
walrus01 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With bulk PV panels by the pallet already at something like $0.42 per STC watt the majority of a residential or small commercial install is already dominated by the cost of labor and other components. I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to p…

This is why covering big box stores with solar panels is generally more economic. Flat roofs with lots of space.

Also, helps reduce solar heat inside without having to paint the roof white.

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

#597

Post by jonnycomputer »

ncmncm wrote: post #398
Retric wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…

There is absolutely no need to buy land to put solar on. So, land cost may be exactly zero. Solar coexists synergetically with many other uses, most particularly reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling and runs cooler, thus more efficiently (up to 2x vs desert); and pasture, where it also cuts evaporation, and the livestock can duck under to get out of sun and rain, and keep weeds down; and cr…

In California I believe that they're given that a try over a stretch of canals. As long as they are robust to windy weather, and don't interfere with water fowl, then sounds like a win-win.

There are so many parking lots, where cars just bake in the sun, that would benefit from solar parking roofing. Cars would have to cool less, and the landowners would have another steady stream of income (its the upfront costs that are the problem as always).

TBH I look forward to a time where you can pull into a supermarket, shaded by solar panel roof, and I can hook up my EV to charge while I'm pulling groceries from the shelves. (Not that I expect the solar to be able to provide all the power needed for EV charging).

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

#598

Post by jillesvangurp »

katkatkatkatket wrote: post #570
jillesvangurp wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here. I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with hig…

>a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after…

20gwh is a nice start of course but like the solar growth is impressive, battery production capacity growth is also impressive. And of course there are many other forms of storage. I'm bringing this up because people seem to worry about intermittency of solar and wind without realizing just how much battery capacity there actually will be in a few years.

I think we can safely expect some records to be broken on the battery storage front in the next few years. Think orders of magnitude here. About three or so in terms of storage capacity. A a couple of thousand x what we have today.

Basically, the likes of Tesla and other manufacturers are really ramping up battery production in the next few years. If you assume EVs have 50kwh batteries (nice number to work with), 2 million cars would have 100,000,000 kwh of battery. Or 100 gwh, or 0.1 twh. That's what they are shooting for end of this year as a production volume. Tesla is aiming for 10-20 million cars per year longer term and the total market is something like 100m vehicles, give or take. 20 million cars is 1 twh. So, we'll be churning out ~5 twh of battery per year; just for cars. Eventually there will be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road. That's an enormous amount of batteries. And of course there will be other vehicles, dedicated grid storage solutions, etc.

Total installed battery capacity world wide will soon hit tens of twh. To give you an idea of just how much that is, annual energy production globally is in the order of 25 peta watt hours (25000 twh). Or about 70twh per day.

The volume of EVs on the road in a few decades will have enough battery capacity to provide that for several days. And of course a lot of car batteries get a second life in the form of grid storage before they eventually get recycled. Car batteries are good for a few thousand cycles. So, for people worrying about durability, once we have tens of twh of batteries, they might be used for decades to power the world before they need replacing. And we'll use solar and other cheap energy sources to keep them topped up.

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

#599

Post by rocqua »

locallost wrote: post #582
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…

One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy. Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to mention that countries want to be energy independent, wh…

I wonder if depance between countries helps avoid wars. It certainly raises the costs, which prevents war being profitable.

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

#600

Post by pydry »

tsimionescu wrote: post #578
pydry wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC put 44% of the company up for sale over a period of many years and the price of microsoft stock did indeed go up during that time. So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.

The hypothetical was about selling them all at once, or a very short period of time.

A) The OP did not mention this.

B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.

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