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How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#81

The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... Tha…

So, yup, we need at least old common high school term paper writing standards, e.g., support every claim with good references to high quality, credible, primary sources. And, of course, as you mention, give the darned dates.

Ah, maybe a lot of media content would be seen right away of no interest if those standards had been followed. Or, about news writing, in some old movies,

"If it's not good, I'll make it good."

and

"A good reporter doesn't get great stories. A good reporter makes them great."

Now from that and not being born recently, I have learned to avoid nearly all news media.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. DoH deals more with streamlining the transmission of requests and responses, but I don't recall any part of the RFC dealing with TTLs. You'll still be talking to your local DNS server with its own caching rules.

I thought part of the big deal with DoH was precisely that you don't use your local DNS server (or more importantly, your ISP's DNS server). If DoH effectively means that more people pull DNS straight from Cloudflare, then I would expect the TTL situation to improve.

Right now Cloudflare is the main provider, but it's an open standard. Anyone would be able to provide the service.

Chrome for example will only use it against your ISPs DNS servers, otherwise it will use Google's servers. So that would at least help, but if the big ISPs start supporting it, then Chrome would use that.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#83
post #81

The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... Tha…

So, yup, we need at least old common high school term paper writing standards, e.g., support every claim with good references to high quality, credible, primary sources. And, of course, as you mention, give the darned dates. Ah, maybe a lot of media content would be seen right away of no interest if those standards had been followed. Or, about news writing, in some old movies, "If it's not good, I'll make it good." a…

It's a bit more complex than that. The life cycle analysis of high-tech products takes many years. That's why most studies seem to be outdated even right after they are just published. It's not just solar panels. Try looking for a life cycle analysis of a recent laptop.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#84

Quote: "The solar powered website bucks against these trends. To drop energy use far below that of the average website, we opted for a back-to-basics web design, using a static website instead of a database driven content management system. " For a website that proud itself on being against trends, I would had more appreciation if they went against the trend to use 3rd party sites and be totally on their own. My NoSc…

That's because you're not on the solar powered website. Hackernews is linking to the old site. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#85
post #51

> However, we’re comparing apples to oranges. We have calculated our emissions based on the embodied energy of our installation. When the carbon intensity of the Spanish power grid is measured, the embodied energy of the renewable power infrastructure is taken to be zero. If we calculated our carbon intensity in the same way, of course it would be zero, too. I don't get it. The carbon intensity of the national grid s…

The carbon intensity of the national grid is calculated as follows: carbon emissions of burning coal and gas in power plants (say 600 g/kWh) + carbon emissions of wind turbines, solar panels and the like (0 g/kWh). Embodied energy is not taken into account.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#86

The author is drastically overestimating the lifecycle emissions and embodied energy of modern solar photovoltaic modules. The article claims that it takes "3,514 MJ of energy to produce one m2 of solar panel." The source for that assertion is this article from 2017: "Energy Payback Time of a Solar Photovoltaic PoweredWaste Plastic Recyclebot System" https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/api/download/urn%3Anbn%3... Tha…

Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much sm…

That study is also badly outdated. Under section 5, Life Cycle Inventory Data, it says "The authors have assembled this LCI data set to the best of their knowledge and in their opinion it gives a reliable representation of the crystalline silicon module production technology in Western-Europe in the year 2005/2006 and Balance-of-System components of the year 2006."

I would love to see a life cycle assessment using wholly up-to-date numbers. I keep reading new studies on PV LCA, energy return on investment, and/or energy payback time. People who write these sorts of papers don't seem to keep up with what industry is actually doing. You can learn a lot from data sheets and trade publications. E.g. from published glass thickness and module size and efficiency, you can calculate the quantity of glass currently needed per watt-peak. It's significantly lower than any of these studies using decade+ outdated numbers.

I think part of the problem is one of incentives. Academics writing about LCA are often comparing some hoped-to-be-up-and-coming technology against the mainstream. Like thin film PV, organic PV, or dye sensitized cells pitted against crystalline silicon PV. In that case using old numbers for silicon PV helps the newer technology look like it offers exciting improvements.

Another problem is that reviewers apparently don't care very much about these temporal effects. They don't chase the citation chains to find the really outdated measurements cited in recently submitted manuscripts.

Another problem is that the solar industry has grown large and competitive. Cutting-edge numbers about energy consumption for silicon refinement are probably retained as a competitive advantage by the biggest producers, for example.

It's possible to set tighter upper bounds on resource intensity just from teardowns of recently manufactured modules. I suppose that teardown based analysis may itself be the sort of information you only get from specialty publications like the Photovoltaics International magazine, which is expensive and not indexed by DOI or part of ordinary academic libraries. (So it's not even in sci-hub.)

It's $599 a year if you want to be able to read back issues of Photovoltaics International from their archives:

https://store.pv-tech.org/photovoltaics-international/

I am interested enough in photovoltaic technology that I have bought a couple of $100+ specialty books from academic publishers, but $599 is a bit too steep even for me.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#87
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For more local purposes, solar + wind is a nice complement. Wind is strongest at night, while solar is best in the day. Nuclear usually needs to keep running, and fewer people use electricity at night (unless you live in Philippines where it is common to only run AC at night to save on electricity).

> Wind is strongest at night This depends on where you are. In many places wind is actually strongest during daytime.

Depending on elevation, among other things. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-the-diurna...

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#88
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the MPPT voltage or the open-circuit voltage? I was thinking of a near-open-circuit voltage (which is what you have if you're powering a 2-watt webserver from a 50-watt solar panel), but MPPT will vary a lot more. Also, covering 6% of your cells will drop your voltage a lot more than covering all your cells 6%.

Open circuit. This is one specific behavior we looked out for when testing panels before shipping, after the EL test, lamination, and junction box installation.

Huh, I guess I must be totally wrong, then. Thank you for the generous correction!

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#89
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lead acid batteries are eminently recyclable. Something like 99% of the lead in a new car battery is from old recycled car batteries.

That's interesting, I couldn't find any reference to that statistic. I've seen estimates in the range of 60-80% recycled content for new lead batteries in the US, but that data seems pretty shaky. I have seen statistics around a recycling rate of 99% or higher in the US, but also that much of that is done in Mexico or other places with very weak environmental and occupational regulations. In any case, lead poisoning…

Take a look at the domestic manufacturers, such as East Penn, and you find that they have their own recycling plants and they charge their customers money when they don't receive a scrap battery on purchase of a new one. They also own most of the distributors of their batteries which run trucks to their customers.

The lead acid battery industry is incredibly competitive and prices unbelievably low due to this vertical integration and mechanized production. Pretty much the only way to beat the U.S. car battery prices is to subsidize (Korea) or pollute like hell (Mexico).

The U.S. is a net importer of lead, largely because all of the SLA batteries coming in from Asia end up in the waste stream as scrap, so there isn't very high demand for virgin (smelted lead concentrate) when all that scrap is sitting around.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Good you mention this. I could have chosen a more elegant citation, but data on the embodied energy of PV modules is generally outdated and confusing. The number I chose is not especially high for panels produced since the 2000s. For an extensive literature summary from 2011 see 2.3 http://www.seas.columbia.edu/clca/Task12_LCI_LCA_10_21_Final... Also keep in mind that all the panels we tested are much sm…

That study is also badly outdated. Under section 5, Life Cycle Inventory Data, it says "The authors have assembled this LCI data set to the best of their knowledge and in their opinion it gives a reliable representation of the crystalline silicon module production technology in Western-Europe in the year 2005/2006 and Balance-of-System components of the year 2006." I would love to see a life cycle assessment using wh…

The obsolescence of life cycle analyses is a topic in itself, and the lack of accessible data is a problem for anyone who tries to investigate high-tech products.

For the solar powered website article, it's the order of magnitude that matters. You say I overestimate the energy use of solar panel production, but in our configuration it corresponds to just 1 liter of oil per year.

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