Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're going to need a lot of solar panels

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 842 posts

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

#681

Post by kragen »

Kon5ole wrote: post #540
acidburnNSA wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.

But how do you consider "full system costs" for something that needs people to manage the waste for 1000+ years even after you have closed the plant? We can evidently not even predict inflation correctly from one month to the next so it seems unlikely that we can know what a nuclear plant actually costs. France has certainly not known, they're currently over 40 billion dollars in debt for their plants (to be paid by…

It's debatable, but at least everyone† agrees that solar panels don't impose major additional costs after initial construction. So I think we can come to less debatable conclusions by noting that the fairly knowable initial construction cost of nuclear power plants is higher than that of utility-scale solar plants, per watt, in most of the world. That way we don't need to argue about how long we have to hire guards for the million cubic meters of slightly contaminated gloves and concrete—even if that cost is zero, nuclear still loses, except in places like Norway.

By the way, France has existed as a nation for about 1700–1800 years. Maybe you mean "longer than France has existed as a state."

______

† There are a few coal-industry shills raising alarms about cadmium, but of course the currently popular kinds of solar panel contain no cadmium, and even the ones that did contain cadmium didn't pose a real problem because of the minuscule quantities and their resistance to corrosion.

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

#682

Post by o_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #267
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…

> but land costs for example aren’t dropping. In the US, land is widely available at around $1000/acre. The current cost to cover that with PV is around $100,000/acre (depending on the fill factor). So, land costs are not a substantial obstacle to reduction in the cost of PV energy.

1000 per acre, maybe in the Mojave desert with a parcel size over 1000 acres. Acreage near anything that isn't a ghost town is well into 10-20k per acre. Land has an inherit scarcity. Investment funds and even other countries are buying up US Land quickly. Land is always the problem. Proximity and transition are also a problem.

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

#683

Post by lutorm »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #675
throwaways85989 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think methanol is even a better storage candidate. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-me...

Methanol is very nasty though. If it leaks, it leaves you blind or dead.

Leaking natural gas tends to leave you exploded, too...

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

#684

Post by illiac786 »

dahfizz wrote: post #664
illiac786 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that is not how condensation works, otherwise you would have automatically more condensation on the wall in a larger room. The amount of condensation on the walls is not dependent on the size of the room or the fact that it condensates on the other walls. It depends on air humidity, air temperature, wall temperature and finally, very important, wall humidity. Water will not keep on accumulating on the wall, it will reach an equilibrium at some point, when the wall itself has become moist. The fact there is condensation or not on the other walls has negligible impact on total air humidity, most of all in larger rooms. And that's the only factor out of the 4 I could imagine being impacted by condensation (or not) on the other walls.

Hence, I still do not understand the logic why isolating only a subset of walls instead of all of them would be a problem.

As I said, I had an energy efficiency specialist at my home which said that isolating 3 walls would be 75% as efficient as isolating 4 and totally recommended. So far, I have not seen any solid logic supporting the fact that isolating only 3 walls instead of 4 would *increase* the risk of mold compared to either, 4-walls all insulated, or, zero walls insulated.

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

#685

Post by robertlagrant »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #528
robertlagrant wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much no-one actively doesn't want renewables. They might not want them built very near them, but that's different.

There's a very obvious paper trail of people not wanting renewables. As the article notes this price decline was predictable decades ago, but you can't really blame people for being dubious about predictions. Maybe the people who got it right were just lucky. But since real actual installed wind and solar became cheaper a while ago, the people still openly arguing against renewables slide ever close to cartoon superv…

People thinking renewables wouldn't be cheaper aren't people who don't want renewables. Why would they even get a mention?.

I'm not convinced enough people know that renewables are cheaper to make the latter claim you're making. For example, in some places as soon as renewables come online they get priority access to demand, and other fuel sources get the leftovers. That's still a subsidy, just by another name. So I don't know if they are cheaper.

Finally, the point about renewables isn't only cost, it's also reliability. The subsidy I just mentioned falsely obviates the need for renewables to be reliable from a cost perspective, but that doesn't mean that needing a high base load (and higher the more we move to electric vehicles) isn't the most important thing to supply.

And none of that is about people "not wanting renewables".

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

#686

Post by Ekaros »

pfdietz wrote: post #658
formerkrogemp wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget the close ties between German politicians and Gazprom executives, among other issues..

Yes, I'm sure the near universal failure of nuclear to compete around the world is due to a conspiracy in Germany.

I blame the Green movement. Those people really just wanted to destroy the planet. Not limit global change...

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

#687

Post by brazzy »

betwixthewires wrote: post #669
brazzy wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> So how many am I wrong by?

Doesn't matter at all because, as I pointed out, the whole approach is ridiculously wrong-headed. We know how much energy we actually need, and it has nothing to do with how much is in the ground and how it got there.

> wind power takes up surface area too.

However, that can even be the same surface area you've already put solar panels on.

> 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

This is correct. But the cap is at about 26000 TW (see https://medium.com/earth-47/how-much-energy-does-the-earth-r...) and the amount we need is about 300 TW, so if we manage to capture only about 0.12% of the available energy, all our needs are already met.

> and necessarily requires environmental destruction.

Sure. But not even remotely close to the degree you're claiming.

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

#688

Post by JohnHaugeland »

cinntaile wrote: post #673
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean what I said, thanks. What we're discussing is people using search engines to identify mechanics. This is not a thing that has been built. This is an idea, not a real thing. You haven't shown any actual examples of this having been built. We can see that Wikipedia page, sure, but there are lots of Wikipedia pages for things that were never built. Those are not real things. It has to have existed to be real. It'…

> I mean what I said, thanks. You said "isn't real", that's literally all you said. It's good that you have since clarified what you meant, but next time define what you mean from the start. Either way the plant in Germany is still operational, the one Audi had. It's operated by Kiwi AG and it's located in Werlte. > I have to to admit, it's pretty exhausting how solar fans always end up relying on devices that have n…

> You said "isn't real", that's literally all you said.

Until you can show me one that's been built, that remains correct.

.

> Either way the plant in Germany is still operational, the one Audi had. It's operated by Kiwi AG and it's located in Werlte.

That's a different plant doing different work in a different city, which was built by different people and never owned by Audi. That plant produces hydrogen from water, not gasoline from air. That plant could never do either half of the work (1. from air, 2. to gasoline) that was being discussed in this thread.

The Audi plant I brought up was in Dresden, on the other side of the country, 350 miles / 550 kilometers away.

.

> Don't make so many assumptions.

Uh.

.

> Pointing out something exists doesn't really give you any info on whether I am a solar fan or not.

That wasn't about you. That was about the ancestor posts I was talking to originally.

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

#689

Post by epistasis »

chrsw wrote: post #642
tppiotrowski wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet. Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?

>How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding? Maybe a different way to ask the same sort of question is: What would the auto industry look like now if the political climate had been more favorable towards electric vehicles?

And for that matter, Tesla cars are not renewable electricity.

I'm taking about specific market forces in the electricity market in the US, not the car market.

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

#690

Post by bluGill »

illiac786 wrote: post #660
marvin wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this -- climates that have cold winters and a tradition for building well-insulated homes have detailed construction customs for how to deal with this. Today, it's generally solved by having an airtight sheet (plastic) between the insulation and the inner wall. Sometimes placed inside the insulation. This ensures a temperature gradient that will not cause condensation inside the house. You'll generally put…

I still don’t get why there would be *more* moisture on the uninsulated inner wall compared to before insulating 3 out of 4 walls.

Because you add the same amount of moisture (showers, cooking, breathing), and it needs to get out before it's was evenly over all 4 walls, now only one. Your total indoor humidity is going to go up because there is less taking care of it.

That said, insulation is still the right answer, but it ain't cheap. OP should probably tear down that beautiful old house for something more modern.

Post reply on HN