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We're going to need a lot of solar panels

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

#781

Post by pclmulqdq »

pydry wrote: post #611
pclmulqdq wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think too many people equate fiction and lies. Stock prices and market caps are not complete lies (the company is still worth something) but they are fictions. I like to think of fiction as "a lie that tells a truth that cannot be told any other way" (adapted from Albert Camus).

Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.

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

#782

Post by ncmncm »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #597
ncmncm wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In California I believe that they're given that a try over a stretch of canals. As long as they are robust to windy weather, and don't interfere with water fowl, then sounds like a win-win. There are so many parking lots, where cars just bake in the sun, that would benefit from solar parking roofing. Cars would have to cool less, and the landowners would have another steady stream of income (its the upfront costs tha…

California has also built on reservoirs; see Healdsburg. But "floatovoltaics" are done much more thus far in southeast Asia.

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

#783

Post by Retric »

ncmncm wrote: post #769
Retric wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no free lunch here. Worker safety, installation costs, maintenance, etc seriously favor installing solar on cheap land rather than as part of mixed use. It’s not just about people falling off roofs, the kW people can install per hour goes down. Similarly you rarely stick solar trackers on roofs and can’t on simple floating platforms while the majority of grid installs use at least single axis tracking which…

Nobody uses solar trackers anymore. And "falling off" is not a thing anybody does out in a field. So, you are concern trolling , and badly. That is unwelcome here. Too, anybody not already handy with putting up fencing is no farmer. Finally, sunshine really is as free as anything ever, and the buckets are cheap and getting cheaper.

You don’t know what your talking about.

Permian Energy Centre is a just completed 460MW project in Texas that uses 1 axis solar trackers. This continues the trend of ~70% of US grid scale installs use single axis tracking, even though it’s a tiny slice of the home market at scale it’s a clear win.

Yes they are more expensive per kWh, but a better match the demand curve means higher profits.

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

#784

Post by tuatoru »

outworlder wrote: post #27
fermentation wrote: post #5

In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.

Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production. In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building a…

> We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky.

Yeah, Jerry Pournelle used to say on this topic, "it's raining soup, and we're too stupid to hold out a bowl."

Well, now we're at least holding out a few soup spoons, and making some more every year.

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

#785

Post by pydry »

tsimionescu wrote: post #741
pydry wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) The OP did not mention this. B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.

> A) The OP did not mention this. The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade". > B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k. Now…

>Now you're exaggerating in the other direction.

Im just illustrating the difference between liquidity and wealth.

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

#786

Post by tuatoru »

distrill wrote: post #31
fermentation wrote: post #5

In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.

tbh i just skip solar panels. it's such a grind. by the time i can make them at scale, i need so many of them, and i hate placing them. even with pretty OP construction bots it's not worth the effort IMO. this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated. i end up…

Real life will probably move on from panels, too. PV will be made on big rolls of plastic film (like mylar or kapton), laid out on the ground. Think 3 meters wide by a kilometre long.

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

#787

Post by Mil0dV »

intrasight wrote: post #244
walrus01 wrote: post #4

We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981 We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everyth…

This is undesirable in the same way shipping water via trucks is a lot less efficient than using pipes.

For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.

Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.

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

#788

Post by rocqua »

jabl wrote: post #653
rocqua wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if depance between countries helps avoid wars. It certainly raises the costs, which prevents war being profitable.

See the German 'Ostpolitik', currently crashing down in flames, why that might not work out that well.

Making wars unprofitable doesn't prevent all wars. That approach is stupid.

However, making war less costly (for the victor) could well cause more wars. I believe that before WW I many a war of conquest was initiated by states hoping to profit. WW I was thought by many states as another great chance to profit, but it turned out that mechanization of logistics, and artillery, meant the toll of war was much lower.

Besides, the 'ospolitik' was more about building relationships and mutual respect than an attempt to affect the cost-revenue analysis of war.

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

#790

Post by rocqua »

throwaways85989 wrote: post #647
rocqua wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I found cool about the synthetic natural gas, is that Europe already has really good seasonal storage of natural gas. Hence the infrastructure is available for summer-time generation of gas using solar abundance that we use in winter for heating. To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by st…

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

Are season-level storage facilities already in existence though? The great thing about natural gas is that Europe already has the storage (and distribution) infrastructure. It would be a waste not to reuse that infra.
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