Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed a huge upcoming one: EV's. I firmly believe that paying EV owners with vehicle-to-load capability will soon be used to smooth out peaks and troughs in the grid. Maybe in the future even systems that use DC fast charging contacts to get the huge DC voltages needed for an external inverter capable of powering several houses.
As in, "an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in"?
Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
591–600 of 607 posts
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
>With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.
Progress marches on: Chemical Process Produces Critical Battery Metals With No Waste https://spectrum.ieee.org/nmc-battery-aspiring-materials Energy storage technology is on a roll, and grid storage isn't limited by weight energy density in the same manner as vehicle batteries are.
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. There's a tradeoff, and batteries are rapidly improving.
>With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.
The current limiting factor is the number of factories making batteries, not the cost per deferred kWh of the batteries they do make.
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed a huge upcoming one: EV's. I firmly believe that paying EV owners with vehicle-to-load capability will soon be used to smooth out peaks and troughs in the grid. Maybe in the future even systems that use DC fast charging contacts to get the huge DC voltages needed for an external inverter capable of powering several houses.
As in, "an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in"?
I suspect we'll see the grid get very close to 100% being the "base" load, and the complexities of having power flow in so many directions will cause the largest blackout to date.
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
in $/kwh. We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we mad…
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…
I kind of see where you're coming from now. However, I don't particularly care about 100x'ing our future at the moment. For right now, I care about solving the existential risk of climate change - lets get to 1x as carbon free as possible, as quickly as possible. And at present the quickest and cheapest way to do that is solar/wind + battery. Any dollar diverted from solar/etc right now to "go full nuclear" delays our progress against decarbonization.
Once we are out of the danger zone we can talk about our 100x future, and sure build nukes for that if you want, sounds great. Perhaps given 20 years of investment we can make them competitive, like we did for solar.
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#597The 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.…
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)
Norway is member of the European Economic Area, not of the European Union, together with Iceland and Liechtenstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why do it at all if there is no accounting to prove it's green? It's almost as if this movement is a scam. No CO2 equivalent publications on solar, or on recycling. It's just "do what we say or the climate will die". I reject that imperative.
Before you've built any green power plants, none of the energy you use to build green power plants can itself be green. When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green. How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making th…
Another dimension is time. They can be considered "green" once they have produced more energy than was used for construction from non-green sources.
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have tried, actually. Maybe you can share what you've learned when you, hypothetically, investigated the question yourself. I'll start. You do need materials, but you can source the materials anywhere on Earth; it's just a question of how expensive it is to refine them. Every element occurs as an impurity in every rock at some level. When you can import them freely, some deposits are uneconomic. For building a plan…
Silicon production is an energy intensive process; you need 11-13 kWh per kg of silicon produced. Technically it's a process using electrodes and thus raw electricity so you could source it from renewable. But that's in theory you need large amount of predictable power for a long time and on demand, which is not at all what the renewables have been so far.
Then if you look into aluminum production you will see that it requires carbon electrodes, that are made in ovens continuously heated to up to 1300°C for hours on end (about 20h per anode). They do not shut down those ovens since it takes multiple WEEKS to get to temperature, and they use natural gaz as the fuel. It's not clear if we could even make an alternative using purely raw electricity that would have enough power density. The aluminum production process itself requires megawatts levels of energy, usually you need a 500MW substation. Most plants are built next to a power plant, usually coal or nuclear. At the current 200W/m2 efficient level for solar panel, you would need about 2 500 km2 of solar panel to get that much power.
Glass production also requires a lot of dense energy. It typically uses gaz for heating but maybe they can figure out an industrial process to electrify it, currently not the case anyway. We are talking about megawatts level of energy again and a glass furnace cannot ever be shut down during its 15-20 years lifetime, so it's not like intermittent renewable are an option.
And I'm not talking about the various mining operations, necessary to get the raw stuff which is basically running almost exclusively on fossil fuel (but at least some of it can be transitioned to electric).
So now, I have to say 2 things: - firstly, my question was obviously rhetoric, the answer for anyone who has studied the subject is clearly no. But that requires an understanding that isn't surface level. - secondly you are clearly an arrogant asshole who thinks he knows shit when he clearly doesn't. But I'll let you live in your fantasy world where you can have industrial production with just electricity from solar panels.