We're going to need a lot of solar panels • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by pydry » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #606

pydry wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall he sold about 44% of the company. He had about 45%. The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up. The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate. The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumpe…

Oh yeah, he sold it very, very slowly, over 20 years. The hypothetical I was responding to is suggesting that these billionaires' fortunes be liquidated within a year. Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.

Yeah, fair point.

Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.

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

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Post by phtrivier » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #496

ncmncm wrote: post #398

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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…

Here in Australia (where it gets pretty hot) a bunch of places have started putting solar panels over carparks. They are great because they shade the cars, and often the installation cost is $0 because the installer will sign a X year agreement with the occupier to provide electricity at Y cost for a number of years.

And here in France, local environmental NGOs are starting to prevent any solar project installed on fields (even with the crops still growing underneath), on the ground "officially", that is ruins the countryside view ; and, "innofficiallt", on the grounds that it's corporations that are installing the panels, ergo it's bad.

https://www.revolution-energetique.com/pourquoi-ces-habitant...

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

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Post by pfdietz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

tedk-42 wrote: post #595

pfdietz wrote: post #315

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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.

We can shift production from port cities with expensive energy to port cities with cheap energy.

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

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Post by adrianN » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #543

adrianN wrote: post #333

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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.

We need to do the cheapest thing that reduces CO2 emissions. Currently I believe that's building more renewables and electrifying more sectors.

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

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Post by illiac786 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

Helmut10001 wrote: post #590

otikik wrote: post #529

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Wow that sounds too high. Maybe insulate only the parts you frequently use, perhaps?

No offense - but insulation doesn't really work like this. If you insulate only one part, you will get massive problems with moisture through heat transfer. With insulation of old houses, so much can go wrong and then the only solution _is_ tearing down the house and building a new one.

This is very interesting. I was told by some energy expert I could isolate 3 out of 4 outer walls and it would work fine. Do you have some documentation on the “moisture through heat transfer” issue?

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

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Post by yayachiken » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

valenterry wrote: post #576

yayachiken wrote: post #533

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> Source? Assuming an economic lifetime of 70 to 100 years for new buildings is industry practice based on standards like DIN 276. You can find those numbers (with some variation) on pretty much every web page dealing with economics of building, for example here: https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge... You can also approximately extrapolate that number from the source I have given you. (Which…

I think you misunderstand what "economic lifetime" means here. It is mostly relevant for tax purposes. In other words: if you build a house for $X and live in it then for tax purposes it is assumed that (on average) after a 100 years you must have been spending $X for maintenance so that you can sell the building for $X. If you have spent more money, then you can't deduct that from tax (exceptions exist). Or in yet o…

These maintenance tasks are exactly what this discussion is about.

You will do major work on roof or facades every 50 years or so. This is exactly the opportunity where you pretty much get insulation for free.

After 100 years the house will have been all but structurally rebuilt once, just for upkeep reasons. You perform energetic renovations together with the upkeep tasks.

And when the house is old enough, the monument protection agency will even force you to do it by that time.

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

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Post by Helmut10001 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

swores wrote: post #603

Helmut10001 wrote: post #527

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It is quite a standard 2-generations house (at that 1925 time), 250 m² and two apartments, + a base level with an office. I am not saying that this is the universal standard - but it is _a_ standard that I do see quite often here, especially if you look outside cities, where the turnaround for reconstructon of houses is slower. .. and this was quite thoroughly calculated. I can tear down the house and build a new one…

Does the calculation stay the same looking decades ahead? I'd have guessed that 200k to rip it down & build a new house that has great insulation - or even to just retrofit insulation and other upgrades to the existing building - would be expected to last longer before costing the same amount against to replace (and/or pricey maintenance/insurance of the more expensive PV, aircon etc.). And might therefore work out c…

Yes, it is difficult and I don't think it is possible to come up with a solution that fits all. What limited I can say: Insurance for the PV is cheaper than insurance for the insulation. That is because more problems with insulation can appear (e.g. fire damage, moisture) than with PV. Insulation of old houses is also far more complex than PV (someone pointed that our here).

.. it was mentioned somewhere here, too: For some, the best solution will be to focus on reducing energy consumption; for other, the better option will be to focus on increasing local energy production. And a combination of both might be best for most.

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

#618

Post by Helmut10001 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

illiac786 wrote: post #615

Helmut10001 wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense - but insulation doesn't really work like this. If you insulate only one part, you will get massive problems with moisture through heat transfer. With insulation of old houses, so much can go wrong and then the only solution _is_ tearing down the house and building a new one.

This is very interesting. I was told by some energy expert I could isolate 3 out of 4 outer walls and it would work fine. Do you have some documentation on the “moisture through heat transfer” issue?

I do not have one at hand, but you should find this in almost any guide. It is not complicated: If you insulate 3 walls and leave one wall untouched - this wall will always be the coldest. That means the water contained in your air will condensate always at this wall (because it is the local minimum), resulting in mould and mildew on this wall over time.

Now, there are all kinds of solutions and they all have caveats. As someone said here, old houses are build so that walls are semi-permeble, meaning that heat constantly wanders to the outside. That also means that the dew point is pretty far towards the outside in winter - water can get out of the house. If you insulate the inner wall, the dew point will move more towards the inside, meaning your walls will get wet and water will take longer to move outside. If you insulate the outside, water cannot get out at all - you must find another solution to get the moisture out of the house. It gets more complicated the more you dive into this topic.

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

#619

Post by Kim_Bruning » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

pcdoodle wrote: post #536

ncmncm wrote: post #518

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Places without enough sun in the winter, and without enough wind, too, sometimes, will just import power. You might be able to draw down on HVDC transmission lines. But there will also be abundant solar farms in the tropics synthesizing ammonia for export. If the weather prediction says not enough wind, and your tanked ammonia would run low, and you can't book enough transmission line power, you just order a shipment…

I had no idea ammonia had such properties, any recommended readings/video?

https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...

Pure hydrogen has some handling difficulties which might be solved by binding it to carbon (eg in Methane: CH_4), or to nitrogen (eg in Ammonia: NH_3).

Ammonia production has as an advantage that nitrogen is available in large quantities in the earth's atmosphere (78%), and ammonia production and usage can therefore _theoretically_ be carbon-neutral (and in fact not involve carbon at all, ideally)

Methane production has as an advantage that you can produce it using atmospheric carbon capture (pulling CO_2 from the air), which means it could theoretically contribute to reduction of greenhouse gasses. A downside of atmospheric carbon capture is that earth atmosphere CO_2 is fairly low (0.04%) .

(note: Atmospheric CO_2 capture is also proposed for Mars ISRU (In-Situ resource utilization), which is one reason why SpaceX is using methane engines for its upcoming generation of (mars) rockets. There's some synergies / extra investments to be had in working on CO2 capture technologies)

(note 2: Current modern methane and ammonia production/delivery tend to use fossil hydrocarbons as the hydrogen donor, rather than water electrolysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammo... )

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

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Post by katkatkatkatket » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #598

katkatkatkatket wrote: post #570

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>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 b…

That's all wonderful. It's going to be fun watching how the economics of raw material mining vs battery recycling works out.