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

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

#661

Post by illiac786 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #646

illiac786 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years Source? Counter examples: my house is built 1908. Lots of other houses built around the same time in the area I live in. My parents live in a house from 1749. The entire village where they live is made of houses built 200+ years ago, it's written on the house in general, hence easy to check. Hence I very much stand by my prediction it…

Your parents house was built in 1749. Do they pay the equivalent carbon tax to own a house like this? Unless it has been hyper-modernized, but the exterior remains old/ancient, I struggle to understand or support your argument. More brutally: If you parents want to live in a house from 1749, should 1.5 billion people (probably more!) in South Asia be forced to live in unsustainable conditions (much high average annua…

You missed my point. I was saying that 100 years max lifecycle for a house is wrong in my view.

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

#662

Post by blurker » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

ChadNauseam wrote: post #199

mmaunder wrote: post #153

The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming mo…

> Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you? > Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and t…

> Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?

Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.

It's incredibly common.

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

#663

Post by blurker » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

toolz wrote: post #236

mmaunder wrote: post #153

The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming mo…

> The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed? If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of human…

> Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.

This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.

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

#664

Post by dahfizz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

illiac786 wrote: post #659

Helmut10001 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But your logic seems to indicate that only one wall will have condensation instead of 4. It’s still an improvement no?

You're concentrating 4 wall's worth of condensation onto just one wall. Instead of being spread out, all the moisture gets on the one wall.

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

#665

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

DanielVZ wrote: post #304

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…

He didn't say that the trend would go forever. He said that he didn't see a reason for them to slow down in the near term, we could still be at the beginning of a sigmoid curve. While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free. For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had…

The Atacama Desert has the best solar resource on the planet.

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

#666

Post by quantumwannabe » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

pawsforthought wrote: post #442

walrus01 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> parking lots This is how much of downtown Tulsa, OK is covered in parking lots: https://i.redd.it/ukzcn1xx6cc91.jpg There is no technological problem to covering a parking lot in PV, it's a question of the political will and money to do it.

That one image very powerfully captures the total and utter idiocy of car-centric development. Imagine if that thin sprinkling of actual buildings were reconfigured into one dense, car-free urban core…

That isn't car centric development, that is urban development in a city that fell into hard times. The whole area in the picture is about one square mile (i.e. it was the dense core of the city), and during boom times it was full of buildings. Many of the buildings were torn down when their owners could no longer afford to maintain them and they were replaced with parking lots because they look a lot better than overgrown fields. As the city revitalizes, the parking lots will be built over and turned back into buildings.

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

#667

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

As I pointed out to Casey on Twitter as well, this strategy works really well with Nuclear as well. Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation.

My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there was any leakage of radioactive material in the even more rare event of an accident) And have that plant produce methane 24/7. It can ship the methane by pipeline to anywhere and provide heating or electricity using existing gas infrastructure.

If you made it a more complex breeder reactor (or had a breeder reactor on site and a fuel reclamation facility) it could do that essentially forever. (caveat lifetime of materials and maintenance etc).

Solar works for this too, but you have to build a lot of panels (this is the article lede of course).

This is also how fusion would change everything as well, with excess power you could spend it on making carbon neutral burnable fuels and desalinating water for mitigating droughts.

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

#668

Post by blurker » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

Willish42 wrote: post #200

Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever? Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane. Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you f…

I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless.

Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.

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

#669

Post by betwixthewires » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #454

betwixthewires wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So draw me a picture then. Let's say I'm off by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, photosynthesis is .001% efficient or whatever. Show me how you create enough energy, the equivalent of a billion years worth of solar energy shining down on three quarters of the surface of the earth, every 200 years. 2000 years. 200,000 years. Without unfathomable environmental destruction. Or how you reduce the energy consumption of 8 billi…

It's not photosynthesis that's .00001% efficient or whatever, it's the whole process, because it's also fuelling the entire lifetime of those organisms before they become fuel in the ground, and all those organisms that don't have just the right conditions for becoming fuel in the ground, and all the fuel in the ground that didn't stay there over those millions of years because it didn't have the right conditions. An…

Alright, so I'm off by how many orders of magnitude then? 4? Or 20? If I'm off by 3 or 4, whatever the reason, my previous comment applies, and the amount of energy you need is still off by orders of magnitude! So how many am I wrong by?

wind power takes up surface area too. In fact, wind is just solar energy. The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law and necessarily requires environmental destruction.

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

#670

Post by ajuc » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #667

As I pointed out to Casey on Twitter as well, this strategy works really well with Nuclear as well. Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation. My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there wa…

> Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation.

I very much doubt you can get higher efficiency by going

    electricity -> fuel -> pipeline -> generator

than by going

    electricity -> wires ->

And even if you just use it for heating (so you skip the last part) - it wouldn't be worth it.

In particular big turbines are about 60% efficient, ICEs are about 30% efficient and electricity -> fuel conversion is even worse.