Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
601–607 of 607 posts
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is often repeated, but is not entirely true. Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours…
Your link shows that yesterday had the highest peak demand of the month and it was between 1-2pm. Spot checking July 2019 the oldest year it had, it's peak day also had the peak at the same time. Do we have different definitions of "late afternoon"? I also don't understand the link's differentiation between "demand" and "usage", but "demand" is higher and nearer noon it seems. It's also not clear if home solar is acc…
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes as I suspected you actually have no clue what you are talking about. You are listing stuff like a recipe as if you can just shop around for those things. 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 predictabl…
Your calculation of solar capacity is off by a factor of a million; 500 megawatts at 200W/m² is 2.5 km², not the 2500 km² you say (the size of Yosemite National Park), which would be 500 terawatts, roughly 30 times current world marketed energy consumption. The same magnitude of error in the other direction would have led you to claim that an aluminum smelting plant requires 500 watts, less power than a household blender.
You also forgot to divide by the capacity factor; 200W/m² is the nameplate capacity, what the square meter produces in full sun, not the year-round average, which is closer to 30W/m², depending on factors like latitude, clouds, and tracking. (That increases the estimate from 2.5km² to 17km², 1700 hectares or 7 sections, the area of the city of Los Altos, California, or a quarter the area of the Curonian Spit park in Kaliningrad.)
These basic errors suggest that either you are not fully aware of the extent of your knowledge, or you are knowingly exaggerating it.
It seems like your primary objection is the intermittency of solar energy, which can be straightforwardly solved with BESS; even without lithium resources, either liquid metal batteries or nickel–iron batteries are an adequate resource anywhere in the world. Sodium-ion batteries are another scalable form of BESS that does not depend on scarce elements; a 200MWh utility-scale sodium-ion battery came online a year ago in Qianjiang: https://www.energy-storage.news/first-half-world-largest-200... but plausibly nobody outside of China knows how to do this.
There are straightforward solutions to the problems you're describing, even without BESS; many haven't been developed beyond the lab scale because they aren't economically competitive with the established approaches you're describing. In a hypothetical blockaded country, those alternatives wouldn't be competing with cheap fossil fuels. In practice, though, BESS is plenty.
Silicon purification to solar grade is not simply an electrolytic process, as you incorrectly imply; it requires a series of refinement steps to become PV-grade silicon.
In the case of glassmaking, the necessary technology is already well developed. An all-electric glassblowing pilot plant entered production last year in Cognac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuK8f4cB7Ps. And you can buy off-the-shelf glassmaking furnaces for mass production: https://www.hornglass.com/products/melting-furnaces-and-equi...
Electrically heated furnaces are more controllable and versatile, which is why they are universally used in laboratory glassmaking. Unlike the case with aluminum, fossil fuels are nothing but trouble for glassmaking; limited adiabatic flame temperatures, glass-batch contamination from fuel impurities, and the unfortunate necessity to vent flame-fired furnace to the atmosphere are problems glassmakers have had to overcome in order to use cheap energy from fossil fuels, not benefits.
Carbon is probably the only possible electrode material for aluminum production, although zirconia has been suggested. The net reaction is Al₂O₃ + 3C → 2Al + 3CO, consuming about 700kg of carbon per tonne of aluminum produced. Fortunately such small quantities of carbon are not difficult to obtain, and in extremis it would even be bearable to obtain them via direct air capture; we're talking about hundreds of grams of carbon per 300-watt solar panel, so a single tree contains enough carbon to smelt the aluminum for a megawatt or so of panels.
Mining is almost entirely electrified already; attempting to run fossil-fuel machinery in an underground mine shaft, or even an indoor warehouse, poses the kind of risk of asphyxiating workers that is normally considered unacceptable except in, for example, Russia. Gargantuan strip mining machinery like the Marion 8750 is largely electric for the same reasons that diesel locomotives are electric.
Thank you for a productive, if gratuitously insulting, exchange of views!
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in, "an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in"?
It's not going to be optional. And day/night isn't even nearly fine enough granularity. It'll be minute by minute and grid tied. 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
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…
The Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes as I suspected you actually have no clue what you are talking about. You are listing stuff like a recipe as if you can just shop around for those things. 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 predictabl…
Thank you for sharing what you know. I'm aware of these issues. My personality is irrelevant to them; they are what they are whether the person talking about them is an arrogant asshole or not. I'm puzzled as to why you thought I'd be interested in discussing whether or not I'm an arrogant asshole, really! Your calculation of solar capacity is off by a factor of a million; 500 megawatts at 200W/m² is 2.5 km², not the…
Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile Germany shut down its nuclear plants while keeping coal and natural gas around to supplement renewables. One of the biggest unforced errors I've heard of recently.
No, Germany is shutting down its coal plants and reduced their usage drastically. Poland is keeping their coal plants open by refusing to invest in quick and cheap renewables. Instead they plan to build nuclear plants for the next 20 years.
> Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.
Is this inaccurate / missing something?