[HN Gopher] We're going to need a lot of solar panels
___________________________________________________________________
We're going to need a lot of solar panels
Author : lionheart
Score : 720 points
Date : 2022-07-22 20:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
| holografix wrote:
| Can someone point me to a "loss of performance" type formula for
| solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90deg and
| "sunshine strength" as the sun rises and dips in the sky?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I suspect the voters of Nevada would say, "Nimby". Maybe the
| DoE should make a reactor like this and put it in DC, where the
| voters are not allowed to say "Nimby". Anti-democracry to save
| the day.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As a former Nevada resident, and someone who has worked at
| the Test Site, I can assure you that it would be unusual if
| the folks living in Nevada objected. :-)
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Back when I had a class in power engineering as part of my EE
| program there was about a week discussing transmission line
| loss. The example we worked on was Hoover Dam which sends its
| electricity 266 miles over transmission lines to LA where the
| University was. It was remarkable how much energy was lost
| both in what are called "i2r" (I squared R) losses (that is
| just the transmission wires losing energy as heat) and
| radiation losses where the power lines are essentially very
| long antennas. There are lots of strategies that are employed
| to mitigate both kinds of losses, those strategies have their
| own limits as well. It is all rather more complex than just
| hooking a wire from point A to point B, as such things are.
|
| The other advantage that Casey's scheme has is power
| generated during the day doesn't need to be consumed right
| away if it is stored in Methane. This is true of Nuclear
| power as well.
|
| The efficiency argument weakened still further if you compare
| the full cost of drilling, extracting, transporting, and then
| burning existing "fossil fuel" sources of methane because
| that not only damages the environment with the contaminated
| ground water from fracking or other extraction methods, but
| adds to greenhouse gasses in the the air.
|
| The efficiency here is that your take zero (or nearly so)
| carbon foot print energy generation to create fuel that has
| net 0 impact on warming gases in the atmosphere (it takes the
| CO2 out of the air which is then re-released back into the
| air when it is burned). _For things that can 't be
| electrified, or are better served by heat combustion._ Those
| things are, jet fuel, heating homes, baking, etc.
|
| The other advantage is it re-uses existing infrastructure. So
| on a dollars per ton reduction of CO2 it is much more
| efficient than existing solutions, whether you use solar or
| nuclear.
|
| Like most things, efficiency is a measure of some metric with
| respect to two choices to achieve the same result.
|
| The choice presented by Casey is "How do you get methane for
| things that use it?"
|
| If your metric is greenhouse gas emissions you get more gas
| with has a much lower greenhouse gas impact. On that basis it
| is much more efficient whether you use Nuclear or Solar as
| your energy input.
| ajuc wrote:
| > The U.S. grid loses about 5 percent of all the
| electricity generated through transmission and distribution
| [1]
|
| Compared to losing over 70% of energy by converting it to
| methane (optimistic bound, I vaguely remember seeing 14%
| efficiency somewhere but can't find it quickly so I doubled
| it and ignored other loses which are probably also over 50%
| combined). I think it's pretty clear it makes no sense to
| do this for predictable baseload powerplants like nuclear.
| The main advantage is storage for unpredictable, time-
| dependent solar energy.
|
| [1] https://www.nrdc.org/experts/jennifer-chen/lost-
| transmission...
| pbourke wrote:
| I was confused about something in this article. After the natural
| gas is synthesized, it's pumped into the existing NG
| infrastructure for heating and electricity generation? Doesn't
| that emit CO2 into the atmosphere once again? Or is it such that
| CO2 removed >> CO2 added?
| BatFastard wrote:
| Indeed that NG that is burned adds to CO2, but its considered
| neutral since it was derived from atmospheric CO2. We still
| need sinks for CO2 that will be removed to atmosphere. But at
| least we can do it cost efficiently.
| zmix wrote:
| Article has very good wording!
| [deleted]
| djenendik wrote:
| As others have pointed going carbon neutral is a good step, but
| should we should keep in mind the CO2 ppm that will be reached at
| the neutrality point. Is this something that we can live with?
| scaramanga wrote:
| As in many times more solar panels than can be constructed with
| all of the resources that can possibly ever be extracted from the
| earth? I suppose that is true, and an be verified with some
| pretty simple back of the envelope calculations.
|
| I must admit, I only skimmed through the apparently meaningless
| technobabble, but if someone could let me know succinctly, we
| still don't have anything more effective at carbon sequestration
| that trees, right? And how well are trees doing?
| hedora wrote:
| Capturing a gallon of gasoline CO2 emissions from the
| atmosphere would cost about a dollar at scale. (1 gallon ->
| 20lbs CO2. Technologies advertising $100/ton of CO2 are
| somewhat common these days. A ton is 2000lbs, so $100 / ton CO2
| implies $1 per gallon of gasoline). There are many technologies
| that could achieve this, but I don't think this article is
| describing one of them.
|
| They want to convert CO2 and water to natural gas and have
| roughly 30% energy efficiency. A gallon of gas contains 33kWh,
| so (handwave gasoline == natural gas), it costs 100kWh per
| gallon equivalent. A kilowatt hour is at least $0.10, so > $10
| per gallon-captured-ish.
|
| If the carbon intensity of natural gas is similar to gasoline,
| so the computation is close enough and the technology in the
| article is about 10x off state of the art.
|
| On the bright side, the article's technology would "only"
| require 5% of the earth's surface be covered in solar panels,
| so state of the art would need 0.5%, which is feasible, in
| terms of land use, at least.
|
| Carbon intensity table:
| https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/b...
| zackmorris wrote:
| Here is a similar project that generates kerosene and diesel from
| water and carbon dioxide by using a ceria-based redox reaction to
| convert them into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas):
|
| https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/
|
| The plant created 5191 liters (1371 gallons) of syngas in 9 days,
| whereas a Boeing 787 Dreamliner carries 126,372 liters (36,384
| gallons). The conversions are not linear, but that is something
| like a refueled plane every 219 days, give or take an order of
| magnitude. Looks like the conversion efficiency is 4% but 20% is
| expected after recycling heat and catalyst improvements.
|
| I find stuff like this simultaneously inspiring and devastating.
| The technology has arrived to easily create our own electricity
| and fuel without having to deal with supply chain issues around
| centralized photovoltaic manufacturers, yet the size of the
| challenge is insurmountable. There is simply no way to scale this
| big enough to save the natural world before global warming
| destroys it at the end of the century.
|
| So, that leaves us with nuclear power (fission). I appreciate
| that a lot of people have worked very hard on it and have
| humanity's best interests at heart. But they don't understand
| human psychology. We all know that we've been lied to about the
| safety of nuclear power, but they pretend that it can be made
| safe. While simultaneously avoiding discussion about the
| externalities like nuclear waste storage, nuclear proliferation,
| even the inherent security issues around large centralized power
| generation or what will happen after wars or other emergencies
| force workers to abandon nuclear facilities. So I don't trust
| them, and that's why I don't consider nuclear to be a viable
| alternative, and I have an unlimited list of evidence against it
| so I don't bother debating it anymore.
|
| Which leaves us with what I feel is the actual solution. Yet
| again, as in most things, we have to pull ourselves up by our
| bootstraps. I think that we'll solve it through cultural
| evolution. Each of us has to get to sustainability on an
| individual level, then lift at least one other person (preferably
| someone we don't know) out of dependence. Which is still a big
| problem, but it's smaller than paying off a mortgage.
|
| So everyone's gotta wake up, forget they got hoodwinked, stop
| listening to the wealthy and powerful people talking us out of
| this, and just start doing it. Be a real conservative, lead by
| example. Be a real liberal, pay it forward. Mourn the breakdown
| of our institutions that set this back 40 years. Then do
| something about it by evangelizing sustainability and stop voting
| for people who pass the buck. Help people who don't get it find
| their way out of cognitive dissonance.
|
| Solarpunk is a great place to start.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| I once estimated that it need the surface area of spain to power
| all of the world. Asuming all energy is electricity at that
| point. And I only took bad numbers like 100w sqm for 2-3 h a day.
|
| So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the
| solution in my opinion.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Or just a few nuclear power plants...
| caseyf7 wrote:
| Why is China's photovoltaic potential so low?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Cloudiness in the populated eastern/southeastern part of the
| country.
|
| Tibet's insolation is really good, though.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| <whisper>we're gonna need nuclear no matter what the "green"
| power people say</whisper>
| brazzy wrote:
| That nuclear fanboyism is sounding more and more like a cult.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > "Our process works by using solar power to split water into
| hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then
| combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas."
|
| That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.
| skybrian wrote:
| This article seems rather hand-wavy. I would have liked to seen
| more about what the physical and economic limits might be. In
| particular, how the cost of the solar panels themselves compare
| with all the other costs needed to get a working plant.
|
| Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can
| labor realistically be reduced?
| philipkglass wrote:
| See section 5.2 of this report:
|
| "U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost
| Benchmark: Q1 2020"
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf
|
| For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun
| tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01
| per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar
| modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters,
| electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system)
| accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11.
| The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the
| stacked bar chart, but below $0.02.
|
| Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs
| start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are
| already companies working on automating additional elements of
| solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's
| Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY
|
| AES claims that with this robot, a crew of only 3 people can
| install a megawatt of panels in a week:
|
| https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar
|
| You could install all the panels for a 100 megawatt solar farm
| like that analyzed above with 6 months and 12 people.
| Willish42 wrote:
| 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 for sharing this OP! This is why I
| come to HN
| blurker wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| Can anyone provide a summary of this blog post? I am finding it
| strangely tricky to follow.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Looks like hopium peddling around their new invention which
| will solve climate change (spoiler alert: it absolutely won't)
| and generate limitless energy at the same time (spoiler alert:
| we have effectively limitless energy in the form of fossil
| fuels, and even if you ignore climate change, we have already
| used it to basically destroy our own future by treating the
| earth as a garbage dump / shithole to be asset stripped of
| everything of worth to convert it into worthless landfill while
| basic human needs are still unmet).
|
| Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I
| have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
| jtolmar wrote:
| Terraform Industries has a process for converting atmospheric
| CO2 and water into hydrocarbons (particularly "natural" gas),
| at the cost of a huge amount of electricity.
|
| Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they
| think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets
| (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places
| over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper.
|
| The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power,
| which would be good for the planet and people in general (and
| unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).
| standardUser wrote:
| Thank you, that is what I gathered, give or take. I guess I
| was just taken aback by the idea that instead of displacing
| natural gas we would use _more_ energy to make natural gas.
| Seems like the ultra-gargantuan investments needed for this
| kind of transition would be better spent transitioning to a
| mostly-electric energy economy.
| atty wrote:
| In the long term, complete displacement of hydrocarbons
| from the economy is probably the end goal. However, we are
| nowhere near being able to do that right now. Obviously for
| the billions of vehicles on the road and the current grid
| power generation we need not just solar/wind generation,
| but also massive amounts of grid storage (or massive
| increases in nuclear) and vehicle batteries. But in
| industry there are tons of chemical processes that also
| require hydrocarbons that we haven't found suitable
| replacements for yet.
|
| Because it's not clear how fast we can get absolutely
| massive amounts of grid storage or nuclear deployed,
| finding ways to make effectively carbon-neutral natural
| gas/petroleum is a good step in the right direction, where
| we can continue to use some hydrocarbons without a net
| increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and oceans.
|
| It's also not clear if we will be able to replace all of
| our current petroleum reliant industrial processes with
| non-carbonized alternatives, and in those cases, this will
| be the absolute best case for us.
| scaramanga wrote:
| No, I think we are quite near to being able to achieve
| that.
|
| There may be billions of vehicles on the road, but as
| soon as the system fails to be able to upkeep all the
| deployed capital required to maintain them in operating
| condition (road resurfacing, parts manufacture,
| refinement and transportation of fuel, maintaining the
| value of currency in order to motivate the workers to
| participate in all of the necessary steps, security from
| hostilities, roads not being flooded/melted, and so on).
| In such eventualities sizeable portions of the fleet may
| be rendered inoperable quite quickly and cars will be
| displaced, out of necessity, by walking.
|
| What you're making is a different point, it's not that we
| can't displace hydrocarbons, it's that we can't displace
| them with something equivalent-or-better. We can probably
| displace cars with walking, concrete structures with ad-
| hoc shelters, and hospitals with prayer. That is all not
| just very achievable, but has actually been increasing in
| inevitability during our prior decades of "inaction"
| (obviously you can't really call it inaction when we're
| taking positives steps to hasten these outcomes)
| jtolmar wrote:
| If you're a central planning committee trying to solve for
| the best outcome under physical constraints, nothing beats
| nuclear power and railroads.
|
| If you're living in an economic system where investment is
| primarily determined by rate of profit, then you need to
| identify a solution where everyone involved is making more
| money than they would be without you. So it's very
| important they're competing with oil on economic terms
| while increasing demand for solar.
| standardUser wrote:
| Maybe if natural gas was in short supply I could
| understand their angle. But it isn't, so I don't. Seems
| like a solution in search of a problem. Meanwhile, global
| warming, the paramount problem, needs fast solutions, not
| elaborate stopgap workarounds.
| krallja wrote:
| > if natural gas was in short supply
|
| You are aware of the situation in western Europe, yes?
| scaramanga wrote:
| Remind me, western europe, that is the place where
| offshore wind is way cheaper than natural gas and other
| alternatives but where the political and economic system
| seems to be completely unable to connect investments with
| rational policy goals (survival, independence) and needs
| of the population (maintaining core temperature within
| non-lethal ranges, etc.)? :)
|
| So I mean, I assume the original point is about
| supply/demand, but supply of gas is already short, prices
| are already high, alternatives are already cheaper, and
| yet our system is still failing to take any action that
| might lead to a survivable outcome. So the supply/demand
| thing seems like a completely meaningless tangent at this
| point??
| kragen wrote:
| It's not natural gas if you're synthesizing it!
|
| Methane has some significant advantages over electricity:
| it's storable over time and can be used to fuel vehicles.
| About a third of the vehicles in this country are methane-
| fueled, in fact. A CNG tank is a hell of a lot cheaper than
| a car-sized lithium battery. If you go further and make the
| methane into kerosene you can fly airplanes with it.
| Airplanes can't fly while they're plugged into the grid.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Nice article, but one sentence annoyed me:
|
| > At current rates of production growth, the supply/demand
| mismatch will see a 10 year backlog between the time when local
| solar powered synthetic fuel production reaches cost parity with
| fossil sources, and when solar supply will be available to meet
| that demand.
|
| I hate this use of "at current rates", it's basically a lie if
| you don't follow up with some kind of lower bound to go with that
| upper bound and people believing this is not possible, or too
| costly, or too late is one of the main problems.
|
| He called out the hairy back prediction graph further up and then
| did basically the same thing with words.
|
| But overall a good summary.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It seems to me we need a lot of nuclear power. In the US, we need
| to close the fuel cycle, reprocessing all the existing spent
| fuel, and building a new class of reactors that can handle the
| resulting fuel mix.
|
| With this base energy supply in hand, our options are far more
| flexible for extracting carbon from the air, and either making
| fuels, or petrochemical feed stock from it.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| I think new nuclear is a distraction from the best solution.
| Closing the fuel cycle is a good idea of course but we don't
| know how to do that yet. Current reprocessing doesn't remove
| the waste it just reduces it.
|
| Reprocessing that can entirely get rid of the waste needs a
| scientific breakthrough that certainly might happen, but trying
| to make it happen will require research centers with highly
| qualified staff, very expensive machinery and will take a long
| time to set up.
|
| Meanwhile just about anyone can put solar panels on their roof
| making it possible for the state to save fuels in central power
| plants for use during the night. This benefit is immediate, and
| because anyone can do it it's currently being deployed faster
| than even non-reprocessing nuclear power plants can be built.
|
| So instead of aiming for new classes of reactors I think we
| should build already known classes of solar panel factories and
| hydrogen electrolysers. Hydrogen electrolysers are insanely
| simple, you can build one using stuff you are likely to have in
| your home already.
|
| The main argument against it at grid-scale is the efficiency,
| but with enough solar panels efficiency becomes basically
| meaningless. When you are filling your "water bottle" from the
| Niagara you can spill a lot and it won't matter.
| ku-man wrote:
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> but the energy demands are astronomical
|
| Maybe not the best idea then.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| If energy production is increasing exponentially, an
| astronomical demand very quickly becomes manageable and then
| trivial
|
| The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess
| were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and
| it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a
| Raspberry Pi
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In
| summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much
| PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all
| demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert.
|
| I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think
| this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I
| want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the
| heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I
| would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle,
| e.g. pretty steep modules at 60deg or 70deg that relatively
| produce less in summer, but more in winter).
|
| Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only
| way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-
| voltage level.
|
| So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation,
| between different time's and regions' needs (winter, summer;
| night, day; or from different regions worldwide).
|
| .. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an
| imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red
| is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp
| are at 60deg angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].
|
| [1]: https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX
|
| [2]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/
| choeger wrote:
| I think with 30kWp you should be able to heat enough sand to
| make it over the winter. It's a matter of space and finding
| someone to build you that heat storage.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 30KW STC rating of PV panels does not product much cumulative
| kWh at all in December and January at latitudes 40+. Forget
| the sand he just doesn't have the watt hours to run electric
| heaters at all.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Currently, it is cheaper though to "sell" the electricity in
| summer and "buy" it back in winter (even if it is at 10x the
| price I sold it for). Compared to private long term storage
| solutions. Most long term electricity storage solutions will
| yield electricity at prices above 80c/kWh here (even lithium
| ion is currently around 50 to 70c, if you calculate 10,000
| hrs average lifetime of house batteries). And you cannot use
| lithium ion for long term storage, you would need H2, or heat
| storage solutions.
| guerby wrote:
| Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at
| around 400 EUR/kWh, here an example of a 5.12 kWh for 2100
| EUR:
|
| https://www.europe.sokbattery.com/product-page/sok-
| battery-1...
|
| These are rated for 6000 cycles to 80% degration, so if we
| take an average of 90% assuming linear degration we will be
| able to output 6000 by 0.9 so 5400 kWh for each kWh of
| battery capacity before the battery reaches 80% of its
| original capacity.
|
| 400 EUR divided by 5400 is 0.074 EUR per kWh out the the
| battery, an order of magnitude lower than the 0.80 EUR per
| kWh you quoted.
|
| These have low self discharge but capacity prices (price
| per kWh stored in the battery) are way too high to do
| seasonal storage.
|
| Note: if you DIY the battery it's half the price: 150-200
| EUR/kWh at the cell level currently.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Your calculations are interesting for day to day peak
| shaving, but as you noted yourself, these batteries are
| way to expensive for seasonal storage. Depending on the
| insulation on your house, one of those would maybe
| contain enough power for 0.3-1 hour of power-use in the
| winter.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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 stockpiling on
| seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent
| production, things will get hairy in winter.
|
| Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't
| turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.
|
| Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily
| variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for
| practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap
| bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill
| the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| I think methanol is even a better storage candidate.
| https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-
| me...
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Methanol is very nasty though. If it leaks, it leaves you
| blind or dead.
| lutorm wrote:
| Leaking natural gas tends to leave you exploded, too...
| krageon wrote:
| Methanol can also explode (and set things on fire). In
| terms of a fire hazard they're both very bad.
| [deleted]
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Leaking methane rises, so it's not a huge problem. We
| have natural methane leaks all over.
| whazor wrote:
| There are natural gas leaks on a regular basis here in
| Europe. It only explodes with a fire source. People smell
| the gas leak and inform the fire station.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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, which will
| be substantially cheaper than NG, from anybody anywhere.
|
| But you will have overbuilt a great deal of cheap solar
| capacity, because anytime it generates more than you can use,
| you can synthesize your own ammonia. First you fill your tanks,
| and then sell the rest.
|
| In winter, the overbuild means you burn less of it. In summer,
| the excess ammonia will find an unlimited market because
| ammonia is so useful. It is fuel, it is fertilizer, it is
| refrigerant, it is feedstock for myriad chemical processes.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I had no idea ammonia had such properties, any recommended
| readings/video?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| 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.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammo... )
| pcdoodle wrote:
| This seems like a gold mine! thanks for the info.
| M_bara wrote:
| Just wondering, isn't it viable to have Solar arrays in the
| Sahara/equator regions and have the power transmitted to
| temperate zones? Is the transmission the issue? Is it politics?
| Super conductors? I'd love to know why we can't have a follow
| the sun global grid...
| kristianp wrote:
| There is a plan afoot to cable electricity from an Australian
| solar farm to Singapore, so these things may be in the
| future: https://suncable.energy/
| the8472 wrote:
| > I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for
| winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60deg or 70deg
| that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
|
| I know there are sun-following installations but those need
| expensive mechanics and control systems. Aren't there middle-
| ground solutions that can be manually adjusted twice a year?
| Bombthecat wrote:
| If 70 to 80 is enough in winter,I would assume that it is
| enough in summer?
| PeterisP wrote:
| It depends on whether the price you're getting for that
| power is sufficiently different between winter and summer;
| because if your contract has a fixed price per kWh then
| optimizing for winter (which gets you a bit more power in
| winter, but a lot less power in summer - because in summer
| the "angle multiplier" gets applied to much more sunlight)
| is a bad decision.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 70-80 degree tilt will produce a lot more at latitude 45+
| from Nov. 1st to end of February, but at the expense of
| much less production kWh per month during the rest of the
| year.
|
| In an off grid totally battery reliant pv system such as
| for some telecom applications you design the PV for
| December, worst month of the year for kWh production. If it
| will "survive" December and provide enough for the load to
| run 24x7 then it'll be fine for the rest of the year. At
| high latitudes this cha mean a 75-80 degree tilt facing
| south.
| benevol wrote:
| Have you considered https://www.KryonEngine.org ?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| What im looking at?
| avhon1 wrote:
| A perpetual motion machine. ("Free Energy" has long been a
| used as a synonym by those who believe it is imminently
| possible.)
| bartwe wrote:
| Sounds like the next step should be long-term at-home storage
| through generation of solid or liquid fuels.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Given the increasing duck-curve
| [https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-solar-power-
| duck-c...] of solar energy production, this makes sense to
| me, economics and efficiency concerns aside.
| nl wrote:
| Surely utility level wind power can fill parts of that gap?
|
| Utility level solar is much more effective too of course.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The catch is that power-to-gas tech described in the article
| will allow you to store the power produced in summer.
|
| Produce excess methane gas in summer, store with existing
| infrastructure, burn it for baseload/winter.
| m12k wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "Just as converting chemical energy in the form of fuel into
| electricity endures 45-75% thermodynamic losses, converting
| electricity back into chemical fuels loses 60-70% of the
| energy in the process. Converting solar power into natural
| gas only to burn it in a gas turbine power plant could help
| with long term seasonal energy storage but is so much less
| cost competitive than other ways to stabilize electricity
| supply that we should expect this usage modality in, at most,
| niche cases."
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| It might be less cost effecient at the moment. But I kinda
| like the decentralized nature of it.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > The catch is that power-to-gas tech described in the
| article
|
| isn't real
| cinntaile wrote:
| The Sabatier reaction has been known since 1897. The Wiki
| article also gives some examples of Power-to-gas systems
| that were built, so I don't know why you claim it's not
| real. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| Ah, yes, a reaction.
|
| Can you show me this actually in use literally anywhere
| on earth for this job, 125 years later?
|
| Where would I go to buy some atmosphere derived gasoline?
|
| You're confusing that something could theoretically be
| done with that it's a real thing that can be relied on
| today at scale to save the planet
|
| If this was a real, practical thing, it would be in use.
| We fight wars over this stuff.
|
| If the thing you want to use to save the world hasn't
| been done at scale, you probably can't get it there in
| the ten years we have left.
|
| In all of history, only one of these has ever been made
| at the megawatt scale. Audi built one in 2013. They took
| it down three years later because it didn't actually
| work. It was supposed to provide fuel for 1300 cars, but
| it couldn't produce 1/10 of what it was supposed to
|
| Yes, I see that you can find things in search engines
|
| No: this is not a real option for saving us from climate
| change
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| What are you going to do with the atmosphere derived
| gasoline that you couldn't do better, cheaper and cleaner
| with cheap electricity?
|
| That's why no one is making it at scale.
|
| We're rapidly expanding renewable production at an
| amazing pace, as the article discusses, but we are very
| much still in the "stop burning fuels and directly
| electrify processes instead" stage, because that is
| currently cheaper even without including long term
| externalities, so even in lawless or suicidal nations
| self-interest makes it happen.
|
| But the relatively small markets that fossil fuels will
| retreat to as electrification takes hold will soon be
| under threat too, for purely economic reasons adding
| extra impetus for change to happen.
|
| Most of those will just use hydrogen directly, further
| reducing the market for gasoline, but again even gasoline
| will be replaced with renewable derived fuels for
| whatever obscure uses we still have for it, because it
| will be cheaper.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I just want to make sure that I'm understanding
| correctly.
|
| You're saying that yes, we can economically make gasoline
| from the air today, and that the reason we don't is all
| the renewable production we're ramping up?
|
| That everyone just decided not to sell carbon negative
| cheap gasoline?
|
| I guess it's silly to ask why you believe that we can do
| this, based on no plant ever having been built with tens
| of billions of incentives available, huh? Probably can't
| get any evidence?
|
| I don't think we're going to be able to see eye to eye on
| this. Thanks for the conversation
| cinntaile wrote:
| Your claim was it wasn't real. Which is factually
| incorrect. If you mean something else you should properly
| articulate what you mean instead.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| 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's kind of wild having to explain what the word "real"
| means.
|
| If these devices are real, can you show me one that
| actually exists or existed, instead of Wikipedia pages
| talking about what they would be?
|
| The page referenced does not mention any real ones.
|
| It seems like you're making claims that they are real, to
| respond to someone asking for examples, and didn't give
| any examples
|
| I have to admit, it's pretty exhausting how solar fans
| always end up relying on devices that have never been
| built to explain why they're the right choice
| cinntaile wrote:
| > 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 never
| been built to explain why they're the right choice
|
| Don't make so many assumptions. Pointing out something
| exists doesn't really give you any info on whether I am a
| solar fan or not. It also doesn't mean I believe it is
| the right choice.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > 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.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Can you link to the plant you refer to?
|
| This plant is in Wertle and it produces e-gas by
| splitting water into H2 and O2 and in the next step the
| H2 reacts with CO2 to give CH4. https://www.audi-
| mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/new-audi-...
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I see that you're continuing to flog the wrong plant by
| the wrong people for the wrong process, after that was
| pointed out to you.
|
| I can link to it, but I gave you more than enough
| information to Google it.
| bob29 wrote:
| There are many chemical plants synthesizing chemicals in
| large quantities: ammonia, ethanol, etc.
|
| Until 10 years ago, the cheapest primary fuel was all
| fossil fuel based, so making synthetic fuels from fossil
| fuels is simply a loss in efficiency.
|
| Only in the last decade, for the first time, renewables
| are a cheaper form of primary energy, creating motivation
| for a fuel producing energy plant R&D.
|
| BTW: instead of raging at people with your own definition
| of "real" and "not real" it may help to talk in terms of
| Technology Readiness Level as used by eg NASA. I can see
| why you say electricity to synthetic fuel "isn't real"
| but its not "not real" in the same way perpetual motion
| is not real.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > There are many chemical plants synthesizing chemicals
| in large quantities: ammonia, ethanol, etc.
|
| There sure are. Zero of them, however, produce gasoline
| or kerosene from air.
|
| Many, many substances cannot be produced in chemical
| plants currently.
|
| .
|
| > Until 10 years ago, the cheapest primary fuel was all
| fossil fuel based
|
| It still is, by leagues. The only reason that isn't
| showing up in the market is a blend of tax and subsidy
| (which I agree with.)
|
| Notice what they use on the ocean, where there aren't
| laws.
|
| .
|
| > making synthetic fuels from fossil fuels is simply a
| loss in efficiency.
|
| This would be true if anyone had ever actually made it
| work at scale.
|
| We're much earlier in that process than you seem to
| believe. The processes that people are talking about are
| things you can demonstrate in a beaker. These are not
| things that have even been industrialized at small scale,
| let alone at large scale.
|
| There's decades of work involved in figuring something
| like that out. You don't just go "here's the money, build
| one."
|
| It might be a good idea to watch some of those old Nova
| specials about Percy Lavon Julian, one of the greatest
| American chemists in history. Not only are the social
| angles interesting - he was a black man in the 1950s, but
| also a source of great wealth to an American dynasty, so
| you had various factions of old white people fighting
| over whether or not to be racist - but also his story is
| crucially informative here.
|
| Mr Julian did invent and discover some plastics and other
| synthetics, yes, but that wasn't his important work.
|
| His important work was taking "yeah this should be
| possible" and turning into "yes, we can do this cheaply
| at scale."
|
| The reason he was so valuable is that that is much,
| _much_ more difficult than the primary research.
|
| I agree, the primary research has been done.
|
| The things that people are bringing up aren't even the
| best examples; MIT's solar trees from 2002 do rings
| around this stuff in efficiency and productivity both per
| pound construction and per acre construction, and can be
| built relatively easily from already commercialized
| parts.
|
| The problem is, once we're done being Cory Doctorow and
| being blown away by what should be possible, someone has
| to actually sit down and do the hard work of figuring out
| how to do it at scale, and then raising the money to do
| so, and then building several generations of factory
| until they get it right.
|
| And yes, this will get done, sure.
|
| But there's a /time/ /limit/ here.
|
| Climate change is already putting island nations
| underwater, putting salt into major city aquifers, has
| been forcing the Army to relocate Louisianans for 30
| years and now it's four states. Our water situation is
| getting to states suing each other and talking about
| piping seawater into Middle America to keep lakes wet.
|
| I love the process you're describing, and I agree that it
| will eventually succeed, but I do not believe there is
| any realistic chance it will succeed in time for this
| specific challenge.
|
| .
|
| > instead of raging at people
|
| (sigh)
|
| .
|
| > your own definition of "real"
|
| "Has existed" is the common, dictionary definiton of
| real.
|
| Why aren't vampires real? They haven't existed yet.
|
| Why isn't strong AI real, even though it seems like it
| should be possible given the simulation argument? It
| hasn't existed yet.
|
| Why aren't consumer jetpacks real, even though working
| jetpacks have been on demo for 100 years? Nobody's made
| them yet.
|
| You know that 30 foot tall robot that some guy in Japan
| made for a TV show? Why isn't the American response to it
| real, even though we have all the same technology that
| one guy in a garage has? Because nobody's made it yet.
|
| Why isn't a man with one son's daughter real, even though
| he can have children? Because knowing that something is
| possible doesn't make it real.
|
| It's very strange to me that you think this is somehow
| "my definition."
|
| .
|
| > its not "not real" in the same way perpetual motion is
| not real.
|
| I never said anything about perpetual motion.
| bob29 wrote:
| I'm not one to argue etymology. Apparently nothing is
| real until it's realized. So "not being real" is
| meaningless and we should discuss whether something is
| "able to be realized".
|
| Can fuels by synthesized at industrial scale?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasol
|
| I'm sure the goalposts just moved LOL
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > we should discuss whether something is "able to be
| realized".
|
| Cool story.
|
| Are you about to say "well what if we can realize the way
| to realize it" when I point out none of the industrial
| work is done, none of the process work is done, none of
| the factories are built, none of the laws are drafted,
| none of the money is raised, none of the functionaries
| are settled, and none of the customers are online?
|
| If you can't point to things that already exist, then
| what you're talking about isn't going to be ready in
| time.
|
| I have been pretty clear that I am not going to be
| convinced by "could be." It's not clear why people insist
| on continuing to try.
| belorn wrote:
| The whole article is basically about the question if solar
| power will continue to drop in price and if power-to-gas tech
| can have a similar drop in price. If those two are true then
| power-to-gas will become economical viable to the point where
| people could use it to store power produced in the summer to
| be burned for baseload/winter. It will also mean that pure
| hydrogen and pure oxygen, in compressed storage, will be is
| expected to reach a point where they are too cheap the meter.
|
| Of course we are not there now. 2030 maybe? 2040?
| kkfx wrote:
| I have a small 5kWp PV at home, with a small lithium storage
| (8kWh) just to cover my arse in case of outage, since here
| (French Alps) there is a very big day-night thermal delta it's
| very good in summer, where at night I just need the VMC in
| passive mode and A/C only during the day, for the rest it's
| enough for heating sanitary water almost ONLY from the Sun,
| winter included, and to run some appliances (dishwasher,
| washing machine etc) in self-consumption. Doing more is needed
| for trying to charge an EV from PV during the day, likely the
| double at minimum, but to heat the house in winter OR:
|
| - I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30kEUR at least just
| to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might
| not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15kEUR
| at least;
|
| - I need a giant insulated, probably underground for mere
| easiness of design, pool and PV plant (I do not know how to
| estimate but surely few swimming pools of water and enough PV
| to heat it) to store enough heat for the night.
|
| Both options are ridiculously expensive especially since they
| still NOT give autonomy since they can support day-to-day
| winter IF the Sun shine enough, witch might but also might not
| happen. Perhaps in a future H2 from hydrolysis will be on sale
| to offer a fuel-cell third option, but I imagine it will be
| even more expensive.
|
| So far it's still FAR, FAR, FAR, cheaper using the grid + an
| emergency wood based heating. Long story short I might accept
| investing (I'm actually in the planning stage) a 15kWp or so PV
| for an EV charging (WFH so without daily car usage) but trying
| more is just money gifted to some company pocket. Oh BTW that's
| JUST for private homes. We also have public buildings AND
| industry...
| stolsvik wrote:
| Wasn't the article exactly about this need for a massive over
| capacity of installed PV, and that it still is possible to do?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If you're on a farm, then vertical bi-facial aligned west/east,
| or even north/south, or some mix, can radically shift the power
| output as required.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
|
| https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S26669552220002...
|
| The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily
| peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like
| to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per
| day.
|
| Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has
| benefits at their latitude too.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that
| you need better insulation.
|
| I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus
| here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is
| overkill for them.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > better insulation
|
| better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can
| afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are
| usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
| midasuni wrote:
| In the U.K. the people who want renewables tend to be under
| 40s that can't afford to buy a house. Those that actively
| don't want renewables tend to own their own home and may
| have a couple the let out.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Pretty much no-one actively doesn't want renewables. They
| might not want them built very near them, but that's
| different.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm not against them, but I think they should not be
| specially subsidised. Just pay what ever the market rate
| at the moment is. If it is not enough to cover investment
| too bad.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| That would be fine with me, if every energy source had to
| pay its own negative externalities.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Will absolutely all of the externalities of mining,
| manufacturing and transport then be also applied to
| renewables?
|
| Also, maybe if there is any risk of damage to
| surroundings like with hydro batteries there would be
| need to deposit amount of money that covers them fully.
| oblio wrote:
| Yes, they should. Otherwise we'll just drown in a hot sea
| of shit, only 50 years down the line. Everything needs to
| be sustainable, kind of by definition.
|
| But as with any problem, let's first start with the stuff
| causing the damage.
|
| Let's get oil and gas and coal to pay for EVERY negative
| externality.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Surely they should be at least as equally subsidized as
| other energy sources, with the cost of external cleanup
| perhaps also factored in?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You wrote: <<Just pay what ever the market rate at the
| moment is.>>
|
| This is positive ridiculous. Are you serious in 2022?
| Your electricity is surely mostly sourced from
| hydrocarbons. Are you paying "true cost"? Surely not. If
| electricity was suddenly twice the cost due to carbon
| costs (which is probably the true environmental cost),
| you would be shouting from your windows to build more
| solar panels and wind turbines.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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
| supervillain status.
| pfdietz wrote:
| "Nuclear would have won if it weren't for you meddling
| kids!"
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Let's not forget the close ties between German
| politicians and Gazprom executives, among other issues..
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure the near universal failure of nuclear to
| compete around the world is due to a conspiracy in
| Germany.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I blame the Green movement. Those people really just
| wanted to destroy the planet. Not limit global change...
| pfdietz wrote:
| I see. The Green movement is globally all powerful, and
| you explain away the fact that the world is still not a
| Green utopia by saying the Green movement isn't actually
| Green. This is awesome mental gymnastics!
|
| The alternate explanation is that nuclear is a sick
| technology, and the Green movement is not responsible for
| its failure. Nuclear was so weak even a group as feckless
| as the Greens could have success against it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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".
| taneq wrote:
| It's not super expensive, really. And this is something
| that building codes can address - either via the gentle
| option of requiring all newly built dwellings to be
| thermally efficient, or the somewhat more assertive route
| of requiring any home sold to have adequate insulation.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| The actual insulation is stupid cheap when you look at the
| ROI. However, installing in on an existing house is really
| tricky and you can cause a lot of moisture related damage
| if you do it in the wrong way.
| Roritharr wrote:
| The house I live in, like everyone's in my street, is
| from the late 1800s. Insulating those houses from the
| outside _is_ very expensive, to the tune of 200k, where
| the house is worth around 500k in the inflated
| environment we 're in. At the very same time, I haven't
| found a single insurance company willing to insure the
| house after insulation for insulation related moisture
| damage.
|
| This makes insulating this house an absurdly bad
| financial decision, since once you have moisture damage
| in any part of this material, you can basically demolish
| most of the walls since it soaks like a sponge.
|
| Mind you, I have not started going into the pitfalls of
| the legality of even touching a house this old in
| Germany, where you have to deal with "Denkmalschutz".
|
| Insulating new construction and retrofitting insulation
| are two absolutely different things and barely have
| anything to do with each other from the cost-benefit
| ratio.
| cabby wrote:
| Have you looked at hempcrete? I'm in France and have just
| started looking at better insulation for an old stone
| large property.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Absolutely, and the thing about old houses is that
| they've evolved to keep moisture and ventilation in check
| without access to modern tech. Modern tech, as you point
| out, usually makes things worse.
|
| My house in Sweden is from the 1950's and I still had to
| be _very_ mindful when adding insulation. The best thing
| I've found is cellulose-based insulation, basically
| shredded newspapers lined with salts and pressed to
| sheets. The can buffer a lot of moisture without
| developing mold.
| badpun wrote:
| Interesting, why isn't the moisture on walls behind
| insulation ever an issue on new construction?
| __alexs wrote:
| Because they use a dual layer construction with an air
| gap between the inner an outer walls. This gives space
| for condensation to occur and evaporate again without
| effecting the living space.
|
| In old buildings with solid walls you can get
| condensation on the walls that will evaporate because the
| living space is heated and we'll ventilated. If you clad
| that wall in insulation you can prevent the evaporation
| which leads to damp problems.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Interesting, why isn 't the moisture on walls behind
| insulation ever an issue on new construction?_
|
| Newer building codes have started to mandate more
| external insulation:
|
| * https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-
| 001-t...
|
| Depending on the climate zone, up to half the insulation
| may be mandated to be on the outside (behind some kind of
| cladding (brick, stucco, siding) to protect it from UV
| and bulk water).
|
| Per the above article, by having the outside be
| insulation, your interior structure is kept warmer, and
| so condensation is less likely to occur.
|
| Do a search for "Joseph Lstiburek" and "Matt Risinger",
| who have lots of articles and videos on building science.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_science
| sgerenser wrote:
| In addition to what was already said, there definitely is
| and has been many moisture issues on walls and exteriors
| in new construction. A condo building near me had to have
| its exterior completely torn off, and lots of sheathing,
| insulation, cladding, etc replaced due to a botched
| install of EIFS. Google for "EIFS failures." This was a
| big problem in the 80s/90s or so but apparently it's
| still happening, at least with subpar builders.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Old constructions are diffusion open, meaning moisture
| can move freely in and out of it. New constructions are
| diffusion closed, meaning you have a steam barrier on the
| inside which blocks the moist indoors air from traveling
| into the walls. This however requires an airtight house
| and mechanical ventilation.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Same here in Spain. But in this climate I don't need
| insulation anyway.. My energy costs are 60 euro a month
| in winter and 30 in summer. No point even trying to
| insulate.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Including heating/gas?
| krageon wrote:
| Is that not energy
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Also the same people who want renewables are usually
| opposed to building new housing so there's that.
|
| What? Why would you think that?
| mustyoshi wrote:
| New housing lowers property demand.
|
| Plus, people usually oppose nuclear which is an expensive
| but stable renewable option.
| pydry wrote:
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They want new housing but often built by the government
| instead of evil property developers.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| And new housing, .. but not built in their neighborhoods.
| Oh, and don't build over farmland or undeveloped green
| spaces.
|
| Without being snarky, the problem here is that there is a
| tension between what people believe in general, and what
| they believe about their situations specifically,
| especially when they have an incentive to feel the
| opposite way about it. For example, people may know (or
| believe) that building duplexes and apartments in their
| neighborhoods will reduce their property values, or "ruin
| the character of the neighborhood" and so oppose them.
| pydry wrote:
| Private property developers simply dont want to build
| affordable housing. The margins are just lower than they
| are for luxury housing. Who would choose to make 4%
| profit when you could make 20?
|
| They do lobby hard to remove building regulations in the
| _name_ of building more affordable housing but they never
| actually build it unless local government actively
| _forces_ them to with some of those regulations they
| hate, at which point they build the bare minimum and
| install a poor door.
| zbrozek wrote:
| They're always going to build the highest margin product
| for which there is demand. You're not going to get cheap
| housing until there is abundance. It's simple supply and
| demand.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Lefties want new houses ? Thats a strange claim to make.
| The most left wing states in the US are the ones that
| build the least new buildings.
| pydry wrote:
| Rich corporate liberals are into trans rights, keeping
| abortion, etc. but they arent keen on new housing either.
| It puts a dent in their property portfolios.
|
| Some people call these people "the left", I suppose, in
| which case yea they're not much keener on new housing
| than the rich corporate conservatives.
|
| Theres also an element by which it is driven by high
| prices and loss aversion. A new homeowner with a $300k
| house and a 95% mortgage is gonna locally fight anything
| that drives up supply and drives them into negative
| equity even if their sympathies do trend left. Nobody
| fights new development as hard when prices are lower,
| which is probably partly why NY's strictest rent control
| (which drives down prices) coincided with the fastest
| building in the 60s.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely - the house is a pretty big country side
| house from 1925, not uncommon in Germany. But (almost)
| impossible to insulate efficiently. My estimates where
| EUR150k to EUR200k, just for the insulation, windows, and
| renewed heaters. In comparison, an 'oversized' 70 kWp PV only
| costs EUR100k, and also returns some income when not all of
| the power is used.
|
| The parameters widely differ between country and city: In the
| country, you usually have space (but lack money), in the
| city, you lack space but can often work with a pretty good
| income (= build a new, energy optimized house).
|
| Every house is different. If I build a new house today, of
| course this would look different.
| otikik wrote:
| Wow that sounds too high. Maybe insulate only the parts you
| frequently use, perhaps?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| 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?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Do you have some documentation on the "moisture
| through heat transfer" issue?_
|
| Warm/er air can hold more moisture than cold/cooler air.
| If part of the house is warm, and you happen to cook
| and/or shower in it, it will have a high moisture
| content.
|
| But water vapour diffuses through-out an enclosure. So
| that water in a gaseous phase will equally spread
| everywhere (eventually).
|
| When it reaches the uninsulated part/s of the structure,
| the air is colder and so can't hold as much moisture
| leading to condensation. Get lots of condensation, and
| you have an environment that is suitable for mold growth
| (which can then release spores in the air and mess up
| indoor air quality (IQA)). Not to mention that water is a
| universal solvent, and so will turn your structure
| (stone, masonry, concrete, wood) to mush over time.
|
| The place of condensation will most likely be a surface
| that is a large temperature change: so in the winter your
| inside is warm, and your uninsulated outside walls are
| cold.
| marvin wrote:
| 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 a sheet that's porous but not
| airtight _outside_ the insulation, to reduce heat loss
| due to convection and also provide an extra layer of
| defense against moisture damage due to wind-blown rain.
|
| This technique necessitates good ventilation (often
| powered) if it's used throughout the entire house. This
| is to avoid saturating the inside air with humidity due
| to breathing and other activity, itself leading to the
| condensation you're trying to avoid. It can sometimes be
| just on e.g. floors and ceilings. Then, the rest of the
| structure might still be leaky enough that mostly passive
| ventilation will do the trick.
|
| Older houses handle the problem by just being so leaky
| that condensation won't be a problem.
| illiac786 wrote:
| 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.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| Most people know that hot air rises. It's helpful to
| think of airflow in terms of energy (temperature is a
| measure of the average kinetic energy of air molecules).
|
| Hotter air has more energy and thus will naturally "flow"
| towards cooler areas with less energy until equilibrium
| is reached.
|
| In this example, the higher temperature air holds more
| moisture. That moisture will be carried along and
| dispersed towards the cooler wall, where it could
| condensate.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I do see your point, you believe the air near the
| uninsulated wall will have even more moisture because
| it's now the only cold wall out of 4 walls. So all the
| moisture goes there instead of being split in 4.
|
| But a wall will stop condensating water when reaching a
| certain degree of humidity. So I'm not entirely convinced
| one can simply divide the amount of humidity in the air
| by the amount of uninsulated walls (or sqm).
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| But your logic seems to indicate that only one wall will
| have condensation instead of 4. It's still an improvement
| no?
| dahfizz wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| 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.
| otikik wrote:
| Several floors were mentioned. Perhaps insulating one of
| them completely is an option then?
| itengelhardt wrote:
| As far as I know, around 1,000 Euro / sqm is a good
| estimate for bringing a 200+ kWh/(sqm * a) house down to
| about 85-100 kWh(sqm * a)
| switch007 wrote:
| That estimate seems insane. Was that a "we're too busy, go
| away" estimate?
|
| How big is the house?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| 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, but apart from the
| waste of resources - building a new one will also cost
| minimum EUR200k - so I thought, why not 'oversize' PV, if
| it only costs EUR100k and can heat the house without
| improving on insulation?
|
| To emphasize, this conclusion will likely not apply to
| the majority of people (especially here on HN) because as
| many have said here, parameters and contexts differ
| widely.
| swores wrote:
| 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 cheaper when looked
| at as a 50 year question rather than 1 year one?
|
| I don't presume to know more than you, not only don't I
| know about your specific situation I also know very
| little about these subjects generally, I'm just curious.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah, there are so many old houses are still sitting around
| in Europe. My area almost every house was built in the late
| 1800s. Looks pretty nice, but insulation sucks.
| z9znz wrote:
| I live in a house in a village in the Netherlands. The
| house is from 20-150 years old, depending on which section
| you're in.
|
| It is cold as f in this place all winter. It's also hot as
| f in these new 37 degree summers.
|
| So the question is, is the problem the old homes, or our
| insistence to live in inefficient buildings in places with
| poor climates?
|
| Of course in this country, there's more demand for housing
| than can be met, so living someplace modern
| (efficient/comfortable) is not necessarily an option based
| on price. So the next choice is relocating to a different
| country which has a more livable climate.
|
| I love architectural history, but we would all be better
| off if modern engineering and design decisions were made on
| new structures to replace the grossly inefficient current
| ones.
| tarsinge wrote:
| From what I've seen with old country side houses in France
| just insulating the roof and the windows can already bring
| very good results (heat lost through walls is usually only
| around 25% of all the losses). A quick and cheap solution
| for the roof is to lose the attic and blow the isolating
| material directly on it.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is
| that you need better insulation.
|
| With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details
| that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this
| person's house needs better insulation. As does _everybody
| else 's_.
|
| You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong".
| These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny"
| details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget.
|
| I mean generally it is well known that you cannot just put
| a lot of PV/Wind and things will work. A smart grid is
| needed, buffers and ideally great insulation although that
| is arguably important for every form of energy. Also at-
| home PV setups are meant to earn money/offset the energy
| bill. Autonomous energy supply is an after-thought that is
| interesting enough but has obviously not been possible with
| any other energy source before actually.
| dvh wrote:
| In a worst case scenario (no gas, no grid electricity), he
| could heat only one room instead of entire house.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| I wish you would expand and clarify the point you are
| trying to make. Currently it sounds like you are angry at a
| group of enthusiasts.
|
| I think for me and the OP it's quite clear that
| optimizations can be made on production and consumption
| side. And in their circumstances financial reality says
| that increasing production is much cheaper, while possibly
| providing extra cash that would enable investment for
| reducing consumption, which in turn would lead to more
| income.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Thanks for the nice summary! I couldn't phrase it better.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| ncmncm wrote:
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| vanviegen wrote:
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I wish you would expand and clarify the point you are
| trying to make.
|
| The problem with people enthusiastically proposing
| renewables as the cheap solution to our energy needs is
| the thousand "little" details like the one above. Whose
| only mention is in the comments like "your math is wrong,
| invest in insulation".
|
| No. The math isn't wrong. Bo, the consumption is correct
| and shouldn't "should be lower". Because it's directly
| indicative of the _reality_.
|
| Yes, you have a couple of enthusiasts who can sink
| another X kiloeuro into rebuilding their house. For the
| absolute vast majority of users it's not a viable option.
|
| So yes, the answer to "PV energy is almost enough in
| summer and not nearly enough in winter" isn't a
| dismissive "you're doing insulation wrong".
|
| Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32201039
| beebeepka wrote:
| Venting is fine but but is there a point you are trying
| to make? Besides the "some people blah blah" strawman?
|
| I shouldn't put solar panels on my roof because it would
| not fix someone else's problems? What kind of logic is
| that?
| magic_hamster wrote:
| I think they're trying to say that insulation (and
| probably other factors) is not just one person's problem
| but an issue of a huge scale, which is true. If solar
| works for you, then that's great, but for a lot of people
| (the majority?) it wouldn't work, or at least not without
| spending a very large amount of money to retrofit your
| house for it.
|
| I think it's a good point even if stated quite poorly.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Let me put it this way: is me having solar panels making
| things worse for "the majority"? If so, how?
|
| Because it sounded like the usual trope that if a
| solution does not fix all problems for all humans
| everywhere, than it it sucks and the person doing what
| they can is a naive fool, if not a straight up villain.
| belorn wrote:
| That is a very strange question. Who in this discussion
| has said that you having solar panels will make it worse
| for the majority?
|
| What comments in this discussion are saying is that solar
| panels won't be cost effective, for some or possible the
| majority of people.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I was responding to a very specific comment.
|
| As for cost effective - subsidies. Big fat subsidies,
| especially for the poor countries. There are more
| important things than cost effective. We're all in this
| together
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| MrMan wrote:
| Cost is not really a valid reason not to pursue
| renewable. We need to switch to renewables no matter the
| cost, so as many people can survive as possible, and
| limit mass extinctions
| krageon wrote:
| > Cost is not really a valid reason not to pursue
| renewable.
|
| If you have a money printer in the basement or free
| materials and slave labour, sure. In every other case it
| quite simply is.
|
| > We need to switch to renewables no matter the cost
|
| All true, but not relevant - we live in the real world
| where we make practical decisions. One of the aspects of
| that is not spending more than you have (for example so
| you can still eat).
| nl wrote:
| Well in Germany at least they have legislative
| requirements for insulation on new builds (and have for
| years).
|
| So that's an actual solution to the problem!
| querez wrote:
| true, except most people don't live in new builds. As
| explained in other comments here, adding insulation to
| old buildings is highly non-trivial.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Well yes, but generally renewable enthusiasts are also
| saying "we need to improve our housing stock". That's
| another of the opportunities to improve people's lives that
| will come through necessary change.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| vasco wrote:
| You make some good points in the middle of the edgy
| writing, but how do you think people get to the point of
| proving out new technology?
|
| You'd be shouting at the magic black gold people too back
| in the day. How would it light people's houses and
| require a full grid installation, and fires and
| blackouts, when candles already fix the real world
| problem.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| surely 'improving housing stock' will require a lot of
| energy expenditures that might not be easy to calculate
| what the actual benefits are.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Housing energy models are well established - things like
| PHPP, which though a bit of a dog to use is well
| validated and cheap. Low and negative carbon techniques
| are also available - things like mycelium insulation,
| which notionally outperforms EPS (and even that pays for
| itself from a carbon perspective very quickly if used
| properly).
| stewbrew wrote:
| How is this a tiny detail. We live in a passivhaus. We
| hardly ever heat. Improving insulation of old houses is an
| important aspect here. Reducing energy consumption is as
| important as generating and storing energy.
| tailsdog wrote:
| The point is that in some situations it can be more cost
| effective to generate additional energy than implement
| energy saving measures such as insulation improvements.
| My house was built in the 1600's it's very difficult to
| insulate properly.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Real Question: I see posts like this often on HN. Why not
| tear down these houses and rebuild with energy efficient
| ones? I know... blah. blah. blah. historical this and
| that... but do you want to suffer from 40+C summers? This
| is the price of history! Think about it. Really really!
| Please start tearing down these horribly inefficient
| houses that are "historical". We already do it for office
| buildings!
| dahfizz wrote:
| The issue is that it's ridiculously expensive. You have
| to pay an inflated price for an existing, perfectly fine
| home. Then you have to pay to have it demolished. Then
| you have to pay to build a brand new home. It's going to
| cost >2x what the resulting home is actually worth.
|
| When the old homes decay to the point that they need to
| be torn down, then they will be. But destroying perfectly
| good houses is just too expensive in this market.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| midasuni wrote:
| I lived in a new house for 5 years from 2016. We keep the
| house warm (21-22), but even then the radiators were
| rarely on, insulation was great.
|
| On the other hand in summer temperatures overnight we're
| still in the 28-30 range in the west facing rooms even at
| midnight.
| stewbrew wrote:
| I don't see how this relates to this discussion other
| than by spamming this subthread.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I appreciate that you don't see how a direct answer to
| your question, where you asked what you don't understand
| and it was spelled out for you, doesn't relate to the
| discussion.
|
| I agree, your attempt to make the world's energy problems
| about the way you live personally in a Passivhaus doesn't
| relate to this discussion. That was kind of my point, as
| well as the point of several other people who've replied
| to you so far.
|
| You might as well ask why everyone doesn't just live in
| an igloo. It's because they don't work in the places that
| most people live, like downtown. And if you try to ask
| the company "hey, I see that you claim you reduce carbon
| by 90%, why wouldn't LEED certify you, they only require
| 30%," the company will quickly change the topic.
|
| I'll try it a little differently.
|
| "If your solution doesn't work for 99.99% of humans, your
| solution just doesn't work."
|
| No, I wasn't selling anything. This wasn't spam. But, you
| knew that.
|
| I was making a good faith attempt to answer the question
| you asked.
| ratww wrote:
| The point is not that everyone should live in a
| passivhaus. The point is that _better_ insulation can
| help reducing energy consumption. Not best: better. Those
| are two different words. No, you don 't need a
| passivhaus, but the passivhaus example, which barely
| needs heating, is useful for demonstrating the efficiency
| of insulation.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > The point is that better insulation can help reducing
| energy consumption
|
| Yes, that's a wonderful tidbit that fans love to say.
|
| It's also about as relevant to the discussion at hand as
| giving tips of how not to spill your coffee on the deck
| to keep it dry is to a sinking boat.
|
| You can't solve climate change with better insulation.
| Sorry.
|
| Part of the problem with the discussion about climate
| change is that people who've never actually looked at the
| numbers feel the emotional need to take the position of
| an expert and explain what will help.
|
| And yes, if a car is rolling down the hill at you, at
| some level, _technically_ , throwing a grape at it will
| slow it down.
|
| But not enough to matter.
|
| When you take the time to put your solution in the
| specific context of the discussion, and take a look at
| how big the impact is, you realize "oh wait, no, this
| actually isn't a valid line of thought."
|
| You might as well try to solve the national debt with a
| ten dollar bill.
|
| You're missing way, way too many zeroes.
|
| In order to stop climate change, we must go carbon
| negative. Energy reduction does not change carbon dynamic
| spread, and cannot solve the problem without reducing our
| energy spend to zero.
|
| I enthusiastically recommend that you read some work by
| the academics before continuing. These are not new ideas,
| and they have been roundly and thoroughly debunked for
| decades.
|
| It turns out that yes, we have thought of insulation.
| This was not a curve ball. Owens Corning has so
| thoroughly advertised it to us that by the time I said
| their name, we all shared a memory of their mascot, its
| song, and their theme color.
|
| There is a reason that absolutely nobody who's got actual
| traction in the field is offering improved insulation as
| a solution.
|
| The reason Passivhaus is a good example is simple: they
| claim a 90% reduction in carbon, and when they tried to
| get LEED certified, LEED said "actually you increase
| carbon, we're not certifying you."
|
| You're listening to marketing, and trying to hold it up
| as engineering. Every time you attempt to google for
| this, please do yourself a favor, and check whether the
| text you're looking at is word for word identical to
| their marketing materials.
|
| Try a university study. None of them say it's a benefit,
| and there have been tons.
|
| Respectfully, no, weird houses that make carbon worse
| aren't going to fix this either. Thanks for
| understanding.
| ratww wrote:
| A lot of what you typed have nothing to do with my
| answer. You also seem to be making a lot of very
| uncharitable and unpolite assumptions about me that don't
| make sense at all, since I only posted one single
| message, so I'll assume you're under the impression that
| I am someone else. Sorry but I won't be dragged into an
| internet argument.
| ajuc wrote:
| > Reducing energy consumption is as important as
| generating and storing energy.
|
| Only if the efficiency is 100%. In practice it's lower
| than that, so reducing consumption is better than
| increasing production.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Not sure how "better insulation" is something "renewable
| enthusiasts conveniently forget". We need better insulation
| either way.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I think what this person meant is the renewable
| enthusiasts treat insulation as something easily done
| whereas it will take 100 years to insulate the majority
| of houses in Europe in my view...
| goodpoint wrote:
| > it will take 100 years to insulate the majority of
| houses in Europe
|
| Citation needed. This number is absurd.
| illiac786 wrote:
| No one can reliably predict this, this is my opinion
| simply. I thought that was clear.
| dmitriid wrote:
| 500 million people.
|
| So, around 200 million or so households. Each household
| (even if it's an apartment) needs both external and
| internal insulation improved.
|
| Same goes for things like stores, factories, schools,
| government buildings, and all other non-residential
| buildings.
|
| Most buildings are built before new energy standards
| (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/eu-buildings-factsheets_en).
| In some countries (esp. the Eadtern block) you probably
| need to teardown old buildings because you can't just
| simply insulate them
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202169)
|
| I'd say "100 years" is a _conservative_ estimation
| goodpoint wrote:
| Except the large majority of buildings are not going to
| last anywhere close to 100 years, and they will be very
| likely be replaced with better buildings long before
| that.
|
| And most of the buildings that instead have a lifespan
| beyond 2122 are historical buildings built with very
| thick walls and they don't need insulation work beyond
| replacing windows.
|
| There are many statistics on building lifecycle that you
| can easily find on the Internet.
|
| So such estimation is really not grounded in reality.
| yayachiken wrote:
| I know you are just illustrating an opinion and not
| meaning it literally, but I want to stress how ridiculous
| your number of 100 years is in reality.
|
| The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany
| is approximately 100 years. Which means that on average,
| the house will be torn down and rebuilt after at most 100
| years, because additional upkeep would not make economic
| sense.
|
| This means that if you do not change policy except
| mandating modern standards for new buildings (which is
| already done) and do literally jack-shit, the normal
| economic activity will have the problem sorted out in
| that timespan.
|
| For reference: Of 22 million buildings in Germany, "only"
| 12.5 million are built before 1977.
|
| The German government aims at having pretty much all
| buildings energetically renovated in 2050.
|
| The biggest problem is that 1. there are many house-
| owners who literally do not give a shit even if they can
| save lots of money by an investment. Not everyone is
| economically minded and there is no political will (or
| legal basis) to force these people for their own good.
| And 2. for bigger apartment buildings etc. it is hard to
| do an invasive renovation while the units are occupied,
| limiting the scope of renovations to something that can
| be done in-place or one unit at a time or without
| affecting tenants.
| onli wrote:
| > _Not everyone is economically minded and there is no
| political will (or legal basis) to force these people for
| their own good._
|
| Not for their own good, but for the common good sure
| there is a legal basis. Eigentum verpflichtet.
|
| Same direction as mandating solar panels for roofs.
| yayachiken wrote:
| What I mean with legal basis is that the laws do not
| exist yet.
|
| The constitution would allow these laws, even to the
| point of expropriation. But as long as the laws do not
| exist there is no legal basis to act on.
|
| In case of conflict, there are some court rulings
| already, for example the highest court recently ruled
| that you may infringe on the neighbors property, if you
| need to insulate your walls in such a way that the
| thicker walls would then be on the neighbours property.
| illiac786 wrote:
| >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 will take 100
| years to isolate the vast majority of houses in Europe.
| Of course it's just a prediction based on my
| observations, I'm not an expert in the area.
| thomashop wrote:
| The person you responded to was talking about the whole
| of Germany. You're talking about one individual village.
|
| Your sample size is too small to make generalisations.
| illiac786 wrote:
| What sample over whole Germany? There is no source, no
| sample, it's a baseless statement.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| 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 annual temperatures) for the "history"
| of your parents' house? Absolutely not.
|
| In contrast, if you support massive gov't subsidies and
| personal taxes to pay for the upgrade of these homes to
| 21st century energy standards, then... sure, no problem,
| they can live in a home from 3000 BC!
| illiac786 wrote:
| You missed my point. I was saying that 100 years max
| lifecycle for a house is wrong in my view.
| bogdanu wrote:
| Europe is a big continent, even EU is so diverse.
|
| A lot of people in Eastern Europe live in apartments and
| houses that can be insulated extremely cheap. There are
| even EU or government programs that make it affordable.
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's not really "extremely cheap" and probably only
| refers to covering old buildings with external
| insulation.
|
| Most of the Soviet-era panel apartment blocks
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_building) have
| extremely shitty _internal_ insulation, too. So you end
| up heating your neighbors, the street, the elevator
| shafts, stairwells etc.
|
| You can't really fix that without extremely costly
| renovations.
|
| Khrusschchyovkas
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka) are
| marginally better due to materials used, but they are 50
| years past their demolition date by now, and will be also
| very expensive to retrofit.
|
| There is also an insane number of new construction in the
| past 30 years. Perhaps for the in-EU Eastern European
| countries regulations and standards work. Everywhere else
| it's "whatever we build, as cheaply as possible"
| bogdanu wrote:
| I think having some insulation is better than having
| none. But yeah, if you want to do it properly, it would
| cost a lot more.
|
| As for heating your neighbours, a lot of cities have city
| heating and is paid depending on how many people live in
| the apartment, so you don't care that much about it. Of
| course, some folks have gas boilers in their apartment
| (like me) but it won't make sense financially to insulate
| the inner walls.
|
| I think it's the same for new buildings here too, if not
| worse. A lot of regulations aren't actually respected and
| because a lot of builders left for WE, there's a huge
| problem with finding skilled workers.
| yayachiken wrote:
| > 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 is based on a survey
| by the federal government of Germany) If approximately
| 50-60% of houses are older than 50 years, then assuming a
| approximately linear to progressive attrition curve you
| will get a number around 100 for the average lifetime.
|
| Of course a long tail exists, but 1. I was talking about
| economic costs, people might just like their houses and
| renovate even though it is financially not worth it, and
| 2. after 100 years the historical protection
| (Denkmalschutz) gets more and more relevant and is a
| whole different set of regulations.
| valenterry wrote:
| 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 other words: if you don't spend anything for
| maintenance then after 100 years (on average) the
| building will be worth nothing, meaning that it will cost
| the same to rebuild it compared to fix it.
|
| But since most people maintan their buildings, i.e. fix
| the roof when it starts leaking, fix the doors and
| windows when they break or are not airtight anymore etc.,
| buildings are much older than 100 years. 100 years is the
| _minimum_ time before it's even worth to rebuild on
| average.
| yayachiken wrote:
| 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.
| valenterry wrote:
| Let me quote you:
|
| > The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany
| is approximately 100 years. Which means that on average,
| the house will be torn down and rebuilt after at most 100
| years, because additional upkeep would not make economic
| sense.
|
| This is just wrong. An economic lifetime of 100 years
| _does not mean_ that the (on average) buildings will be
| torn down and rebuilt after at most 100 years.
|
| And I have already explained why that is. Please read my
| post again and try to understand it.
|
| > 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.
|
| No. This is also just wrong. Yes, when major work on roof
| or facades have to be done, this is usually the best
| opportunity to also improve insulation. But you don't
| "pretty much get insulation for free". Unless you have a
| very uncommon definition of "pretty much for free".
|
| Mind that I'm not saying that insulation isn't worth it
| or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that some
| parts of what you are writing are wrong. And the sources
| you cited are not supporting your claims. That's all.
| yayachiken wrote:
| Please don't forget that my claim is in the context of
| somebody else claiming that insulating all housing in
| Europe would at least take 100 years.
|
| Now you are literally redefining the terms I use and then
| quoting them back to me to argue your new semantics, are
| you serious?
|
| On average, a house is considered to last 100 years in
| Germany. Call it economic lifetime or whatever else you
| want. I still stand by that claim, as it is common
| knowledge. I quoted specific numbers on the housing stock
| which are consistent with that claim (though no proof of
| causation, as there are plenty of reasons why we have a
| lot of new stock, for example in general rising number of
| buildings.)
|
| And of course the insulation is not "for free", but the
| additional costs are usually worth it. I also mentioned
| that many people decide irrationally because they do not
| want the work associated with planning and ordering the
| maintenance to be performed.
|
| None of this matters to show that the above mentioned
| claim how long renovation of the current housing stock
| will take is completely out of the world.
|
| Note that I am by no means a civil engineer or architect,
| but following the discussion and researching the topics
| associated with the Energiewende in the different sectors
| for over a decade now. I may still well be wrong in this
| instance. But you won't convince me of that if you try to
| prove me wrong on semantics and just asserting that I
| were intellectually unable to understand your arguments.
| So please also state some relevant facts and sources to
| support your claims if you want to try further to
| convince me, otherwise continuing this discussion is
| probably a waste of time for me as we both will probably
| not learn anything new. Thanks.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Assuming an economic lifetime of 70 to 100 years for
| new buildings is industry practice based on standards
| like DIN 276.
|
| Sure, but that wasn't the standard 100 years ago. There
| are plenty of existing houses that are 100+ years old
| that will continue to stand for at least another 100
| years.
| midasuni wrote:
| You can usually improve insulation by popping down to the
| local DIY store and buying some rolls for your loft
| making a big difference.
|
| Of course you can only do that once. And if you're a
| landlord why would you pay your money to insulate when
| you wont save any money as your tenants are the ones
| paying the bills.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In some countries, you can't rent out homes that fall
| below a certain standard for insulation, and the
| efficiency is rated as part of every property sale, which
| internalises the cost savings and makes it worthwile.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| Have you ever heard of mould? Moisture in the walls?
| Caused by shifting dew points. Your "just pop down to the
| hardware store" DIY insulation will do a lot of damage.
| lrem wrote:
| Much of eastern Europe, so not particularly rich or well
| run countries, went from zero (due to cheap Russian gas
| in Warsaw pact) to ~everything insulated (because trying
| to cut dependency on a mortal enemy) in less than two
| decades.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'm from Moldova. No, they didn't go to "everything is
| insulated" even in the wildest dreams.
| beebeepka wrote:
| The EU paid for lots of insulation here in Bulgaria.
| Mostly blocks of flats, of course. They were ugly and
| really needed it. Hope you guys enter the union soon
| dmitriid wrote:
| Thank you. I couldn't have phrased it this well
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This is Northern Europe, tho. 95% of the world's population
| gets much, much better solar...
| krzyk wrote:
| Other places get much more heat, which is not good for solar.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| On the contrary, it's far better suited to providing demand
| when solar is most available. It's far better than trying
| to fight the cold using solar. The tiny theoretical
| efficiency boost from lower temperatures and high sun is
| virtually irrelevant in comparison (and much more relevant
| to thermal power plant considerations).
|
| Much of the world gets literally twice the sunlight as most
| of Germany and that's the annual average. When talking
| about the winter time, the difference can be more like a
| factor of 5 or more when taking into account heat needs.
|
| I fail to see why people use northern Europe as the
| baseline for their solar arguments when it's clearly a
| cornercase, given a global perspective.
| MilaM wrote:
| The question is, if complete energy autonomy is even that
| desirable. From an economic perspective I think it makes sense
| to use the grid as a kind of battery. Sell surplus energy to
| the grid in summer, buy it back in winter (ideally renewable)
| and let the utilities deal with the headache of balancing
| supply/demand and storage.
|
| Also, solar panel efficiency is still increasing at a steady
| pace. A gain of 50% compared to the average efficiency of
| currently sold panels seems to be achievable in a couple of
| years. 20% vs. 30% could be all you need to improve your
| calculation.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| In north-west eu maybe, in south-west not so much; I have had
| solar for 20 years in different houses in the south and it
| covers more than enough all year round (we are off grid).
| During the days, summer and winter, you can switch on whatever
| as it will never run out; during the night it obviously depends
| on the amount and quality of batteries. I have had 1 moment
| without power and that was a rare event for that location: snow
| covering the solar panels.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You're still seeing a large swing in insolation between
| summer and winter in SW Europe. You can tilt the PV arrays to
| increase winter production at the expense of summer (and at
| expense of overall production); did you do that?
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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 more
| next year is an economic failure.
|
| We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our
| solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then
| buy even more of the same thing next year.
|
| Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the
| world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for
| the planet. It's a risk because we've all gotten comfy with the
| guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over
| time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
|
| Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites
| for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility
| and realize that we're the problem, and our system of forever
| growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| So, the good news is that we can generate all the power we will
| ever need from the sun using cheap solar panels that will last
| a very long time.
|
| You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is
| expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this
| century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but
| that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really
| monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that
| it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
|
| Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with
| price and production growth trends suggested in the article
| might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to
| think. Exponentials are funny like that.
|
| Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it
| is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that
| seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with
| things like this is that they have a certain inevitability
| about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy.
| Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point
| the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion
| for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are
| going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought.
| Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel
| being cheaper than fossil fuel.
| steve76 wrote:
| steve76 wrote:
| hackerlight wrote:
| You have it backwards. Solar panels are a fungible commodity
| good with no differentiation besides quality and cost. The
| financial incentive points strongly in the direction of
| longevity.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable
| appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show
| some humility and realize that we're the problem, and our
| system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet,
| the better.
|
| Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only
| valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path
| forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up
| with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
| amelius wrote:
| Ban advertising, and let the world go back to yellow pages.
|
| A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted.
|
| Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case
| banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
|
| Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save
| a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
|
| I would happily defend the position that advertising does
| more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply
| in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into
| oblivion.
|
| Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry,
| and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide
| next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy
| people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people,
| girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got
| companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane
| working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break
| quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are
| pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid
| of moral and ethical fibre.
|
| Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their
| refurbished furniture, while their business model still
| relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and
| planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely
| represent themselves as "sustainable"?
|
| Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial
| complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business
| models.
|
| The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on
| our society.
|
| I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I
| would definitely welcome _far, far_ more savage regulation of
| it.
| hobofan wrote:
| It's downvoted because its a broad populist statement that
| isn't actionable in that form and doesn't provide any value
| to the discussion. In contrast your take is a lot more
| nuanced and something that actually can serve as a basis
| for fruitful discussion.
|
| Banning advertisment outright is about as realistic as
| banning humans from communicating.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| That's fine, but pointing that out, like you did now and
| providing a cogent reply like I tried to almost always
| leads to interesting discussions, I've found. The trolls
| run away at the first sight of real discussion anyway,
| most of the time.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > 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 this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon
| for the planet. It's a risk because we've all gotten comfy with
| the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth
| more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
|
| It's much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are
| structured under the assumption that there's many more young
| people than old people, so the young people can share the load
| of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When
| you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old
| goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger
| percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That's
| not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young
| people, or a position I'd want to be put in as an older person
| blurker wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _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
| more next year is an economic failure_
|
| It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is
| subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you
| just subscribe to them.
| windows2020 wrote:
| > Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable
| appetites for reproducing and consuming.
|
| Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
|
| I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the
| contrary will become fashionable again.
| jakear wrote:
| > Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
|
| Yes, see: every "invasive" species. Or bacterial infection.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah but would you tell a living plant that to their face?
| Those poor ivy, kudzu, algae, and dandelion weeds! /s
| toolz wrote:
| > 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 humans, earth is
| just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_
| humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the
| capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
|
| Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind
| to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend
| otherwise.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| > How many extinction events have there been that just wiped
| out the vast majority of species far before humans even
| existed?
|
| Those weren't caused by the species themselves though
| seandoe wrote:
| I appreciate this all-too-rare take. It concerns me that it's
| so popular to be negative. I believe a lot more good can come
| about with a positive attitude -- honest and critical at
| times, yes, but at some point you just gotta put your boots
| on and get to work.
| badpun wrote:
| > In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another
| mass extinction event
|
| Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening,
| and it's caused by humans:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
| blurker wrote:
| > 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It's been a while since I've read something that made me feel as
| excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.
|
| It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if
| sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start
| selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply
| and demand.
| epistasis wrote:
| The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big
| barrier is political.
|
| There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable
| energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the
| leadership.
|
| And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean
| that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies
| that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out
| there.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| 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?
| epistasis wrote:
| Make financial sense to whom? If solar is cheaper than
| natural gas, how does a utility profit from charging less?
| They are highly regulated, and are usually allowed to take
| a percentage as profit. So it's in their interest to take
| the more expensive option, depending on regulations
|
| Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past
| five years of cost data.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Natural gas runs on cloudy days and at night.
|
| Taking a bus is cheaper than flying, but if you want to
| get somewhere fast you need to fly. Price is just one
| metric.
| epistasis wrote:
| In the US, the rare instances of more open markets for
| electricity generation markets, like ERCOT, and seeing
| wind/solar/storage dominate over natural gas in new
| deployments.
|
| This wouldn't happen unless they actually were cheaper.
|
| However, regulated monopolies in other parts of the
| country have no incentive to innovate or use newer
| technology. Thus they make their five year plans (usually
| called IRPs) with opaque financial models with out-of-
| date costs, leading to bad decision making.
| chrsw wrote:
| >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?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| I really want carbon capture to work, but arguing from first
| principles, I think the approach in the paper will be a niche
| product, and is probably a decade too early. (I honestly do wish
| them well.)
|
| Feel free to poke holes in my math:
|
| From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy
| efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by
| three below.
|
| They propose using this for natural gas production for home
| heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters
| and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have
| coefficients of power above four, in practice.
|
| So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy
| boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no
| transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient;
| they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it.
| Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is
| free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy
| prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly.
|
| With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric
| heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat
| pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but
| remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand!
| Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it
| could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the
| weekend.)
|
| On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and
| replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications:
|
| There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than
| burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just"
| break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the
| technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon
| unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's
| much better than net zero.
|
| As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach
| wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar
| panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have
| already ramped carbon capture!
| danschumann wrote:
| I mean if we suck it out of the air and put it back in cars, then
| we close the loop, right? No more externalities?
| akira2501 wrote:
| A monoculture of generation and distribution technologies is not
| a desirable outcome from an engineering perspective. Your goal
| shouldn't be to put PV everywhere and then just "solve the
| distribution problem." You're almost certainly going to make
| things worse that way.
|
| Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd
| think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that
| don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial
| processes that rely on continued excesses to function.
|
| It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient
| ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.
| gregschlom wrote:
| It sounds like you didn't read the article. They aren't talking
| about putting solar panels everywhere, they're talking about
| using massive amounts of solar panel in a specific location and
| use the energy to convert the CO2 in the air into methane.
| akira2501 wrote:
| This is such an odd way to address an argument. From the
| article:
|
| "Substituting solar power into our electrical grid and
| atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons into our fuel supply
| chain is just the beginning. We want to support a future of
| abundance and wealth, while avoiding starvation even as
| legacy climate damage shifts rainfall patterns and causes
| extreme weather."
|
| Seems pretty one-track to me.
|
| Also, there are no manufacturing processes with infinite
| scalability. And the article fails to make clear their large
| scale intentions. They go back and forth between some Sarahan
| style plant, and the total amount of PV available and the
| current planned excess power due to this and never offer a
| solid plan as far as I can tell.
|
| Aside from that.. it's a back of the envelope analysis that
| just projects trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for
| emergent phenomenon due to the massive market swings it
| projects.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > it's a back of the envelope analysis that just projects
| trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for emergent
| phenomenon due to the massive market swings it projects.
|
| seems like there's a lot of this going around recently
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| That and nobody has ever suggested that we rely solely on
| solar for energy needs. Wind, for example, is cheaper than
| solar (though solar is catching up.)
| jshen wrote:
| Wind and solar both need to be combined with something else
| because it's not always sunny and windy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Energy storage
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Could you be more specific? Because battery energy
| storage barely works for houses and you can't build pump
| storage everywhere. Then there are few prototypes like
| Power-To-Gas which has promising prospect and rest is in
| level of sci-fi
| adrianN wrote:
| 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).
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| We need storage now as we are burning coal and gas as
| replacement for energy storage.
| adrianN wrote:
| We need to do the cheapest thing that reduces CO2
| emissions. Currently I believe that's building more
| renewables and electrifying more sectors.
| jshen wrote:
| We also need to avoid a monoculture of energy source.
| Having all our eggs in one or two baskets is very risky.
| tstrimple wrote:
| These are old talking points. Solar plants with gigawatts
| of storage are being built right now, today. Costs for
| such large scale storage are dropping quickly and are
| estimated to cost half of what they do today in 2030.
| Nuclear proponents need to update their material with the
| times. They keep insisting that nuclear is "The Only Way"
| meanwhile, in reality, we're building renewables backed
| by storage at higher rates than ever before. Solar plus
| storage is cheaper and faster to build TODAY than nuclear
| has ever been.
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/03/07/solar-and-battery-storage-
| mak...
| outworlder wrote:
| If we forget about where the power is coming from for the moment,
| wasn't the US Navy experimenting with fuel synthesis? Did that go
| anywhere?
|
| A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only
| stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make
| fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a
| game changer.
|
| Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find:
| https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers...
|
| 300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible
| potential.
|
| Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the
| tech.
| user-one1 wrote:
| You should check out Prometheus Fuels:
| https://prometheusfuels.com/
| beambot wrote:
| A project related to the Navy project was "Project Foghorn" at
| GoogleX: https://x.company/projects/foghorn/
|
| A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus
| Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-
| playwright-ai...
| martyvis wrote:
| Porsche are on to it.
| https://newsroom.porsche.com/en_AU/2022/sustainability/porsc...
| woah wrote:
| Is this better or worse than the one where they are cooking corn
| husks to make oil to squirt into the ground?
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| These are orthogonal concepts this is an attempt to create a
| carbon neutral hydrocarbon for energy use, the other is an
| attempt at carbon negative sequestration.
| AdamTReineke wrote:
| This is better. Terraform believes they can make methane from
| the air for cheaper than it can be extracted from the ground,
| leading to a preference for "carbon neutral" fuels. Part of
| their thesis though is the requirement for solar to keep
| getting cheaper and cheaper (as it has).
|
| Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground,
| presumably.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| What's a more efficient way to split water into hydrogen and
| oxygen: using electricity from a solar panel or using
| photosynthesis in a plant?
| outworlder wrote:
| That is a good question.
|
| Do you have any uses for the plant, or does it create
| interesting byproducts for you? Photosynthesis is not very
| efficient, but it is great at making complex organic
| molecules like sugar or cellulose.
|
| But a plant needs more than power. It needs nutrients,
| usually in the form of fertilizer.
|
| They also don't generally make hydrogen, not directly at
| least.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Electrolysis is orders of magnitude more efficient, but
| your equipment isn't self replicating.
| manmal wrote:
| Another thing to consider: plants currently require a lot
| of natural gas or other fossil fuels to grow. Droughts and
| heat waves can disrupt production.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You are talking about use of natural gas to make nitrogen
| fertilizer; ammonia made with "green hydrogen" replaces
| this.
| leobg wrote:
| What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the
| consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill
| my house's tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that
| something that would be technically feasible today?
| ttyyzz wrote:
| Hydrogen. This is my neighbor: https://hoermannsolar.de/wohnen-
| im-wasserstoffhaus/
| manmal wrote:
| I keep reading that H2 storage is difficult, lossy, and
| dangerous. H2 gas stations have blown up every now and then.
| Has that changed?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hydrogen can be stored underground (and is), just like
| natural gas. This is much cheaper per unit energy storage
| capacity than storing energy in batteries.
| manmal wrote:
| AFAIK H2 is way more difficult to contain than natural
| gas, as the molecules are so tiny. Very hard to build a
| container that doesn't continuously leak the gas.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hydrogen has been stored underground in multiple places.
| This is not some speculative technology, it actually
| exists. The problem you describe is not a blocker.
| Granted, underground storage is at a larger scale than
| for an individual. Storing hydrogen in your home is
| probably not a good idea. Storing thermal energy
| underground, on the other hand, could make sense for
| seasonal storage. Ground source heat pumps essentially do
| that.
| ttyyzz wrote:
| there is a short term battery based storage but the long
| term storage for the winter months is the h2 storage. I
| think the system is very expensive but a cool prove of
| concept and for sure a step in the right direction.
| leobg wrote:
| Do you have an idea of how much that system costs? I mean
| if you could pay 100k once and be free of all energy
| bills for the lifetime of the house/the system it could
| be quite a value proposition. May Putin, OPEC and the
| government do what they want - you just do your own power
| and heat, with no more middlemen.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| no.
| zizee wrote:
| Why convert to gas for heating later when you can just store
| heat itself?*
|
| There was an article/discussion here recently about heat
| batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for
| heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement
| at scale.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006791
|
| *This is a rhetorical question, I'm sure everyone can easily
| think of many benefits. But there is elegance in simplicity.
| leobg wrote:
| Sounds great!
|
| I wonder: Why is sand better than the dirt that's already on
| site? Dirt, after all, contains water, which I believe should
| have an even higher thermal capacity, or not?
|
| Also: How about combining this approach with a heat pump
| instead of resistive heating?
| brazzy wrote:
| Storing heat for months requires really, _really_ good
| insulation, and insulating many small stores is _far_ more
| expensive than insulating one big store (essentially a
| square-cube thing).
|
| So this kind of thing may only be viable for industrial
| processes.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| In the residential context, the magic word here is "ground
| source heat pump". A really big coolant loop that stores heat
| underground. Depending on the jurisdiction and loop size,
| figure it will cost $15,000+
| briantakita wrote:
| Abiotic genesis of petroleum
|
| https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
|
| Observed abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan
|
| https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20...
| shaburn wrote:
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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 was enough willpower and budget to cover, for
| instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with
| hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
|
| I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a
| mention of it, or anything much else about long distance
| transport of power.
|
| The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of
| square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to
| Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a
| matter of the political will and budget to do it.
|
| https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Europe would then become the vassal of whoever is running Libya
| with their hand on the circuit breaker.
| lenkite wrote:
| No worries - There will be another NATO "freedom/democracy"
| mission as soon as that occurs.
| intrasight wrote:
| "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 everything that
| produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be
| standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road
| and not rail, or something more purpose built? High
| production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be
| spread across long distances
| intrasight wrote:
| Rail is indeed appropriate too. In fact better and we
| should have more of it. But I say no to "special purpose"
| and thus to transmission lines too. They are ugly and
| inefficient and we'd need to invest trillions, as these
| analysts are saying. Just makes no sense when we can
| instead use rail and road. Invest those trillions in better
| rail and road. And people in those "high production
| locales" I'm sure would rather have rail and road than
| transmission lines.
|
| Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
| badpun wrote:
| I'd MUCH rather have transmission lines behind my window
| than a busy rail or road, generating noise, pollution,
| congestion and danger.
| ehnto wrote:
| There is another such project going on now, to connect
| Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector.
| Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar
| to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths
| of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this
| stage).
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
| locallost wrote:
| One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some
| places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the
| haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That
| it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy.
| Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the
| time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to
| mention that countries want to be energy independent, which
| would be another improvement to the situation we are currently
| in.
| rocqua wrote:
| I wonder if depance between countries helps avoid wars. It
| certainly raises the costs, which prevents war being
| profitable.
| jabl wrote:
| See the German 'Ostpolitik', currently crashing down in
| flames, why that might not work out that well.
| thejarren wrote:
| Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore
| is running power wires to gather solar from Australia?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
| incompatible wrote:
| Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had
| an anti renewable energy government, which was more
| interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps
| make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low
| population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Australia and its policy on coal mines and such seems like
| a bizarre version of USA Republicans. It's like English-
| colonialism Texas.
| stevage wrote:
| Yes, although with our recent election result, it looks
| like the tide may finally have turned. The pro coal
| government really sucked. They went from "we support
| renewables in theory but the economic case isn't there"
| to "we will do anything possible to continue to burn
| coal, including buying uneconomic coal power stations
| whose owners don't want to run them anymore'.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I never understood the laziness of the coal lobby, why
| would they not want to own the next new energy source en
| mass. They could have blanketed the hunter and all of
| FNQLD with arrays and just printed money. Such a classic
| stuffy old white man style way of trying to bend the
| world to their way of thinking. Though it did work for a
| while, I must admit.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| """
|
| The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm
| Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023
|
| """
|
| Being developed
| tren wrote:
| I think it has a good chance of happening with Mike-cannon
| Brookes and Andrew Forrest pushing it along. I hope it's
| better protected than the internet subsea cables, those
| things get cut about once per year.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Cut internet cables is just a matter of statistics, there
| are simply a lot of these cables so a even individually
| rare events happen relatively often. Submarine fibre
| cables already carry significant electrical power for the
| amplifiers and are well armored, I doubt that elictricity
| cables would be much better. The issue is typically ships
| ignoring no-anchor areas, that's also why most of these
| cuts happen in more unregulated regions.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| walrus01 wrote:
| I read the article, I disagree with the concept of using PV
| to generate artificial hydrocarbon fuels in general, as not a
| great business plan. It's not the best use of the technology
| when we should be bypassing that entirely.
|
| Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir
| or something if you need energy storage, not drive a
| complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store
| in a tank and burn in an engine.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Except we have millions of devices now that rely on
| hydrocarbons that will have to be transition... somehow?
|
| And the infrastructure used to sequester carbon from the
| air can be turned around and deployed later when we want to
| sequester carbon without creating hydrocarbons.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Pumped reservoir storage is horrifically inefficient,
| environmentally terrible for the local ecosystem, and not
| scalable. You can't just go and build a reservoir anywhere
| you like.
|
| Chemical energy storage is simple, scalable, and allows for
| the easy movement of vast amounts of energy over great
| distances to be used anywhere with minimal changes to
| existing infrastructure.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| When talking about pumped hydro the roundtrip efficiency
| usually is around 70-80%. Not even close to batteries but
| way more scalable.
|
| Chemical storage is horrific. Creating diesel and burning
| it in a turbine or similar you start at 40-50% for the
| burning phase, without even converting anything in the
| first place.
|
| If you go the fuel cell route you tend to end up
| somewhere at 40-60% efficiency.
|
| So no, the only use case for chemical storage is either
| where you want energy density. Say aviation or maritime
| shipping. Or nation state like energy security, where you
| can pay the efficiency price.
|
| For all other use cases any optimization done, or better
| usage of the energy, will eat into that horrific round
| trip efficiency.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| How is it as scalable when you're at the mercy of the
| local geology? There are not that many places where
| pumped storage is viable, its not just pumping water up
| to some random hill.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| The question rather is, how much pumped storage do you
| even need when you do geographical decoupling through
| HVDC interconnections?
|
| Similarly, how bound are you to the local topology? The
| longest already existing HVDC line in China is 3,293 km
| (2,046 miles). That brings you from the Rockies to any
| location within continental US.
|
| Utilize renewables to have bidirectional flow compared to
| traditional hydro.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Except, it _really is_ just pumping water up a hill.
| Siting for pumped storage is overwhelmingly easier than
| for hydro generation. The latter needs a watershed. A
| dike around a hilltop does not.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Until energy density of batteries improves by a couple
| orders of magnitude, we're at least going to need
| hydrocarbons to fly planes, no?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Density is almost irrelevant, all that matters here is
| cost.
|
| And one order of magnitude is more than enough. But yeah,
| besides planes and rockets, hydrocarbons are important in
| several industrial processes. Besides, we don't want to
| replace all of the cars, trucks and ships in a single
| decade.
| walrus01 wrote:
| _maybe_ , but it's also a national embarrassment that
| most of the major population centers in the US Northeast
| seemingly cannot be connected by 350 km/h high speed rail
| such as what China has very rapidly built since 2010.
| Flights of 1-2 hour duration between many locations in
| North America should be replaced with rail in most
| scenarios.
|
| either the political will or budget to do this apparently
| does not exist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
| chroma wrote:
| It's clear that the US cannot build high speed rail.
| Since 2009, California has spent tens of billions on HSR
| and has nothing to show for it. There are too many
| hurdles to overcome. Existing rail lines have turns that
| are too sharp for HSR, so the government must use eminent
| domain to take people's property. Construction is delayed
| by environmental reviews. There are issues with noise.
| You have to build train stations in urban areas where
| real estate is ridiculously expensive. Smaller towns
| along the route can threaten to block or delay the rail
| line unless they get political favors. And so on.
|
| The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be
| to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening.
| That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a
| flight, making flying more competitive for shorter
| distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll
| most likely be for shorter flights at first (since
| battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or
| cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel
| times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact,
| and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly
| more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new
| tracks).
| pydry wrote:
| HSR in America is a victim of American oligarchy's
| obsession with de-taxing land.
|
| Same reason why a 2 bed in SF is so absurdly priced.
|
| Higher taxes on land will reduce its value - making land
| purchases cheaper. This will bring American HSR costs
| more in line with China's.
|
| China also reduces land acquisition costs by building a
| lot of elevated HSR and reduces overall HSR costs through
| economies of scale - something that doesnt work when you
| limit HSR to one area.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Once hydrogen-powered aircraft move into a route,
| kerosene craft will be wholly unable to compete, and will
| be pushed out to less profitable routes.
|
| The hydrogen will be electrolysed from water and
| liquified right at the airport, from power delivered by
| HVDC lines.
|
| I expect the LH2 tankage will be in under-wing nacelles
| alongside the engines. Probably existing airframes can be
| retrofitted.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not necessarily, we could use plain hydrogen. (Could
| probably even do it with beamed power, but that's a tech
| I consider to be insanely unwise to deploy).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably going to be the last thing to decarbonize.
|
| Might be able to run off biodiesel or similar. Even if
| biofuel is double the cost of current dino juice, fuel
| makes up 20-40% of major airline's opex, so it's not like
| crude-free flying will kill the industry.
|
| Might even be made up with increased aircraft efficiency,
| more intermediate stop operations (saving 15-30% in fuel
| by flying 2x medium haul instead of 1x long haul) and
| better load factors ("revenue management").
| jjk166 wrote:
| Biodiesel is just hydrocarbon fuels produced via solar
| energy with extra steps
| _mhr_ wrote:
| I've never made a comment on HN commenting on someone else's
| tone, but I've seen this exact response, word for word, a lot
| recently on many posts. I don't like this trend. I find it to
| be adversarial and in bad faith. Suppose they did read the
| article. Are they likely to reply to you defending
| themselves? Next time, please address the actual content of
| their comment instead.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not the original poster and perhaps it was adversarial, but
| I think it is also pretty clear that they did not read the
| article. Of course, they won't admit that (who wants to
| admit not reading the article?) so they will reply
| contextualizing their point to the article.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| I'm not sure what to make of your hypothetical question
| about the GP commenter's likelihood of responding, since
| the first (and only) response to this when I went to bed
| was from walrus01, whom I was responding to and had a brief
| conversation with.
|
| I commented in this way because the article directly
| addressed the problems with the GP comment, and the GP
| comment made no mention of it. There's also a pattern on HN
| and elsewhere of comments popping up in top-level threads
| made in bad faith to derail and redirect conversation,
| especially on anything related to power generation or
| renewables. Telling someone to "address the actual content"
| is precisely what I was doing.
| bernardlunn wrote:
| Yep & check out: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
| bequanna wrote:
| > The technology now exists to theoretically cover many
| hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the
| electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
|
| Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement
| over the current situation?
|
| Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely
| on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
| walrus01 wrote:
| realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was
| highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african
| countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a
| scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline
| supplies.
|
| if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough
| political will to require libya to do its bidding through
| threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst
| case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet
| regime. the balance of the size of the economies and
| population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very
| different than western europe vs russia.
|
| not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed
| state the size of russia.
| kragen wrote:
| > _if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough
| political will to require libya to do its bidding through
| threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst
| case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet
| regime._
|
| This sounds like a a plausible reason for the Libyan
| government to refuse any such project; b a good reason for
| the Spanish and French to ally with the Libyan government
| (puppet or otherwise) against the Germans and Italians, or
| the Germans and Spanish to ally with them against the
| Italians and French, or whatever; c unstable after a few
| decades, when Europe's own military forces are no longer
| overwhelmingly larger than Libya's.
|
| (Don't think c can happen in Libya? The Eight-Nation
| Alliance didn't think it could happen in China either.)
| silvestrov wrote:
| There is sun enough in Spain and Italy (and even France and
| south Germany) that we don't need Morocco/Libya.
|
| Also: heat and dusty environments are really bad for
| efficiency. Better with a place where it rains once in a
| while.
|
| Today at 13:00 more than 38% of electricy in Germany was
| produced by solar panels!
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
| walrus01 wrote:
| that is a very good point and _of course_ as much as
| possible should be generated domestically first.
|
| If you open a high res aerial view of any random french
| or german city right now and look at the roofs of how
| many warehouses and huge structures are presently covered
| in PV, versus how many _could_ be covered in PV if we
| really wanted to, for instance.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| We _could_ also cover all the roads with PV, invest
| highly in saltwater batteries, the global grid , small,
| modular nuclear reactors, solar desalination,
| developement help for poor countries by building up a
| local solar industry etc. etc.
|
| But the world is rather focused on war. Now in the
| ukraine, but taiwan is building up. I mean, a nuclear
| holocaust would also reduce CO2 emissions, but seriously,
| it is so frustrating that there are technological
| solutions to real problems, but they are just not
| seriously implemented. We could, but we don't. At least
| not on a global scale.
| ku-man wrote:
| conradev wrote:
| > if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for
| instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA
| with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
|
| One such project being built currently:
| https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu...
|
| More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of
| batteries
| uhtred wrote:
| > The technology now exists to theoretically cover many
| hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the
| electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
|
| I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on
| other countries for energy
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| Solar fans really want to cover entire countries in panels,
| instead of just building nuclear power
|
| "We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is
| what you just said. Look carefully.
|
| We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you
| want the world wired up
|
| Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe.
| There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
|
| People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope,
| but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany
| keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
|
| It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just
| give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they
| have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to
| share.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing
| fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives
| to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic
| fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what
| is interesting here.
|
| I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with
| a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK
| from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the
| interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to
| produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of
| cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to
| 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such
| cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables
| impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying
| cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing
| but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is
| for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar
| power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the
| winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar
| generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK
| that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part
| of the year.
|
| Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco.
| Most of the US is further south than places like the UK,
| Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite
| being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days
| and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short,
| people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it
| is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the
| year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to
| compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in
| terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of
| exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way
| for very long.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| >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 a several month outage due to another fire)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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 battery storage front in the next few years. Think
| orders of magnitude here. About three or so in terms of
| storage capacity. A a couple of thousand x what we have
| today.
|
| Basically, the likes of Tesla and other manufacturers are
| really ramping up battery production in the next few years.
| If you assume EVs have 50kwh batteries (nice number to work
| with), 2 million cars would have 100,000,000 kwh of
| battery. Or 100 gwh, or 0.1 twh. That's what they are
| shooting for end of this year as a production volume. Tesla
| is aiming for 10-20 million cars per year longer term and
| the total market is something like 100m vehicles, give or
| take. 20 million cars is 1 twh. So, we'll be churning out
| ~5 twh of battery per year; just for cars. Eventually there
| will be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road. That's an
| enormous amount of batteries. And of course there will be
| other vehicles, dedicated grid storage solutions, etc.
|
| Total installed battery capacity world wide will soon hit
| tens of twh. To give you an idea of just how much that is,
| annual energy production globally is in the order of 25
| peta watt hours (25000 twh). Or about 70twh per day.
|
| The volume of EVs on the road in a few decades will have
| enough battery capacity to provide that for several days.
| And of course a lot of car batteries get a second life in
| the form of grid storage before they eventually get
| recycled. Car batteries are good for a few thousand cycles.
| So, for people worrying about durability, once we have tens
| of twh of batteries, they might be used for decades to
| power the world before they need replacing. And we'll use
| solar and other cheap energy sources to keep them topped
| up.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| That's all wonderful. It's going to be fun watching how
| the economics of raw material mining vs battery recycling
| works out.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Just more engineering challenges. It's going to be fine.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Germany cancelled projects in Africa with HVDC cables up-
| continent when solar panel cost dropped to the point that
| they can just buy enough local panels to meet power needs.
|
| Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high
| temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker.
| They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for
| the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more
| reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The
| reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when
| power demand is lower.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Look at how well Europe's dependence on Russian gas is going.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Even places that are not very sunny get a preposterous amount
| of sun energy per square meter and solar is in any case to be
| synergistically combined with wind energy. This is a total non-
| concern, nobody needs to start building in Libya of all places.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| States will be trading fresh water for clean energy
| metalliqaz wrote:
| But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from
| the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported
| using our existing infrastructure...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is Hacker News, not "Hackers who read the article News"
| shusaku wrote:
| "I had a preconceived notion about the article, control-f
| searched for it, didn't find it, so I wrote a comment"
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The same author has a really good blog article with the math
| showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with
| poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to
| bring it in from sunnier places.
|
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
| Retric wrote:
| 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 vs
| weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You
| can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge
| batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from
| somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
|
| A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than
| one between 2.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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 cropland,
| where it cuts water and heat stress, often increasing
| yield. Siting on industrial and warehouse roofing makes
| roofs last longer.
|
| Agriculturally, bifacial fence-rows running north-south are
| easiest and cheapest to deploy, and collecting most in
| morning and afternoon better matches demand curves.
|
| Siting solar panels in deserts will soon be recognized as
| very stupid. They collect dust and run hot, cutting their
| output often in half. Siting them in single-use arrays not
| in desert is almost as bad.
|
| Just now Utah is frantic about the Great Salt Lake drying
| up and then blanketing the region in toxic dust. Cover it
| over with solar panels, and it will fill back up.
| Retric wrote:
| 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 provides more
| power in the morning and evening.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| 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 that are the problem as always).
|
| TBH I look forward to a time where you can pull into a
| supermarket, shaded by solar panel roof, and I can hook
| up my EV to charge while I'm pulling groceries from the
| shelves. (Not that I expect the solar to be able to
| provide all the power needed for EV charging).
| nl wrote:
| 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.
| phtrivier wrote:
| 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...
| stevage wrote:
| Well the author points out with data to back them up that
| people have incorrectly assumed many times along the way
| that the exponential trend was about to end, while in fact
| it's accelerating.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs
| for example aren't dropping.
|
| The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it
| directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top
| of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and
| businesses with ample room for panels.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Rooftop solar is now far more expensive than utility
| scale solar. As a renter who subsidies this through my
| electricity bills I don't understand why I should be
| subsidising more artisanal scale generation for
| homeowners at 3x the price of utility scale solar.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Transmission costs exceed production costs in many
| jurisdictions. Rooftop solar can often eliminate the need
| for very costly distribution upgrades.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Certainly not in California where the transmission cost
| savings from rooftop solar are less than 1% per kWh vs
| the 200% increase in costs vs utility scale solar.
| https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-03-28/solar-
| rooft...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| That underlies my thought on roof top solar. Big picture
| we can build out twice as much utility scale solar for
| the same expenditure of resources. If homeowners are
| going to spend $$ on something replacing gas furnaces
| with heat pumps would be better.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Your article says that production is 7 to 9 cents and
| that distribution is 10 to 20 cents.
|
| The problem is that rooftop solar is not lowering those
| distribution costs in any substantial fashion.
| stevenally wrote:
| The utilities should be forced to allow rooftop solar to
| run during network power outages. That would be a
| compelling incentive for some people.
| baq wrote:
| Resynchronizing all those installations to the grid
| without a DC step in between (powerwall basically) will
| cause a lot of blown fuses in the best case.
|
| Unless you mean that powerwalls are banned?
| topkai22 wrote:
| Mostly because it gets it installed.
|
| I'm vaguely attached to a utility scale deal trying to
| happen. The land owners are interested, the utility is
| interested, and there isn't much around the site. Still
| the details might kill the deal- they can't agree where
| the HV lines will run, the utility wants a bit more land
| than the owners want to lease, access details and
| liability concerns are coming up, etc...
|
| Utility scale solar is the future but rooftop solar gets
| installed NOW because each deal is simpler.
|
| Now why my utility isn't building out solar fields in the
| massive amounts of land they own around their coal and
| oil fired plants...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Maybe you can help steer the project toward a dual use of
| a reservoir or pasture.
|
| When you don't have to pay rent on land, you don't need
| to pack the panels cheek by jowl. Pasture doesn't
| normally generate much revenue, per acre, and it tends to
| be all at once, so something producing year-round is a
| welcome buffer. The livestock keep down weeds and benefit
| from shelter, so are healthier.
|
| On water, the panels are kept cool and therefore both
| notably more efficient, but also last much longer. Nobody
| knows yet how much longer. They cut evaporation and
| biofouling.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| 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 to be paid for,
| my guess is it's VERY cheap.
| [deleted]
| pfdietz wrote:
| The Atacama Desert has the best solar resource on the
| planet.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Moore's law will eventually stop, too. But people have been
| predicting the end for 50 years and it still looks like it
| has at least another 10 to go. It seems quite clear that
| solar costs will continue to drop exponentially until the
| end of the decade, which is all the author's assumptions
| need.
|
| Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred
| dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor.
| And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the
| land.
| borissk wrote:
| Moore's law already stopped - since Intel's 10nm process
| was delayed by 5 years. The exponential grown continues,
| but a lot slower than predicted by Moore.
| uwuemu wrote:
| Even that "exponential" growth is a not a thing anymore.
| There are factors which make it less obvious (growing
| TDPs of modern CPUs and GPUs; going wider, i.e.
| increasing the number of CPU cores, instead of faster;
| making chiplets and building cpus out of them instead of
| big single dies), but these factors only postpone the
| inevitable (there's only so many levers you can pull and
| most of them have already been pulled). We're a couple
| years away from the silicon limit, the 2nm situation
| already looks grim.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, it _is_ our best /easiest bet for future power
| generation. I can totally see why more money keeps being
| pumped into it.
|
| Either more efficient panels, cheaper panels, or simply a
| greater manufacturing capacity are all fine for securing
| the energy needs of the planet.
|
| And we won't have to worry about running out anytime in
| the next billion years or so.
| Retric wrote:
| The article suggested local production, good luck buying
| land anywhere close to NYC at 100$/acre.
|
| Mores law also failed several times. More revised his
| initial 1965 estimate for a doubling every year in 1975.
| He predicted various doubling rates with the weakest form
| being transistors on a single chip every 2 years starting
| in 1980.
|
| So, it's current form isn't an exponential increase in
| density but in terms of transistors on a single chip. If
| density actually doubled every 2 years then starting from
| 1971 an Intel 4004 @ 188 t/mm then we should have hit 6
| million t/mm in 2001 and 197 t/mm in 2011. Except chips
| only broke 6 million in 2012 (11 years late) and are
| nowhere near 197 million t/mm in 2022.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You can get land in upstate NY for $1000/acre. There's a
| lot of cheap rural land even on the east cost.
|
| Arguing that Manhattan is expensive therefore PV doesn't
| work is like arguing Manhattan is expensive therefore
| agriculture doesn't work.
| Retric wrote:
| Edit2: Closest found was 9k per acre a little over 250
| miles away.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You can find much cheaper than that. For example, at
| $1128/acre:
|
| https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/0-Ward-Loomis-Rd-
| Oxford-N...
|
| (~214 miles from Oxford NY to Manhattan by road)
|
| (search in Zillow by county)
| walrus01 wrote:
| 250 miles is a totally normal distance for high voltage
| AC electrical transmission lines.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Running normal high voltage lines 250 miles isn't free,
| and that cost should be part of the comparison used.
|
| Also, the cheapest land I found was 4k/acre, still well
| above pfdietz's estimate.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't think I've posted any land cost estimates,
| elsewhere in this thread I mentioned how many warehouse
| roofs in NJ, Staten island and long island have no solar
| on them.
| walrus01 wrote:
| You're definitely not going to power all of NYC by
| rooftop solar, but also look at the size of the warehouse
| roofs (empty, no solar) in NJ just across the river, and
| out on long island. And Staten island. Etc.
|
| Empty land is not necessarily a requirement.
|
| Parking lot per-row shade structures that integrate PV
| panels on top are also a thing now, and there are sure a
| shitload of parking lots in NJ and out on long island.
| opo wrote:
| Rooftop solar is far more expensive than solar put on
| land. The cost of rooftop solar (particularly homeowner
| solar) is usually hidden by implementing a big subsidy to
| wealthy consumers that is paid for by less wealthy
| consumers - sort of a reverse robin hood scheme.
|
| We are well past the point where anyone can argue we
| should subsidize rooftop solar because we need to help
| build a fledgling industry - yet I see solar advocates
| continue to advocate for this wealth transfer from the
| poor to the well off.
| 10u152 wrote:
| Why is rooftop solar more expensive?
|
| Mounting structure is there, grid supply is there, no
| issues with weeds/grasses, generally up in the air etc.
|
| Rooftops are unused space.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm not from the area, but isn't Manhattan well known for
| its tall buildings? How would those buildings' shade
| affect solar panels closer to ground level, e.g.
| warehouse roofs and parking shade structures?
| walrus01 wrote:
| With bulk PV panels by the pallet already at something like
| $0.42 per STC watt the majority of a residential or small
| commercial install is already dominated by the cost of
| labor and other components.
|
| I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of
| twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160
| per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL
| freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put
| those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
| kragen wrote:
| I think the situation is even more extreme than you say.
|
| https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-
| preis... has EUR0.43 per watt peak (STC watt) only for
| high-efficiency panels, the kind you buy when you're
| tight on space (or the cost of your installation is
| dominated by the cost of labor, as you say). "Mainstream"
| is EUR0.33/Wp and "low cost" is EUR0.22/Wp.
|
| Also, these costs seem to be much higher as a result of
| the current supply-chain crisis. The low point so far was
| August 02020, with high-efficiency panels at EUR0.30/Wp
| and low-cost panels at EUR0.16/Wp. Probably at some point
| shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even
| lower than that.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I was basing that off a fairly pessimistic cost of $0.42
| USD/STC watt for a single pallet quantity. Going well
| beyond single pallet quantities the cost drops quite a
| lot.
| pydry wrote:
| This is why covering big box stores with solar panels is
| generally more economic. Flat roofs with lots of space.
| rocqua wrote:
| Also, helps reduce solar heat inside without having to
| paint the roof white.
| [deleted]
| Syonyk wrote:
| It should run you about $0.75/W to install them and hook
| them in for a grid tie system, maybe a hair more.
| Interestingly, that's the same for roof mount (with rapid
| shutdown) or ground mount (without rapid shutdown). Costs
| vary slightly depending on what you're doing in terms of
| panel orientation and inverter DC:AC ratio (if it's not
| 1.2 or greater, add more panels).
|
| This project (CO2 to CH4) would benefit from maximum raw
| production per panel, if you can ramp the plants up and
| down, so aim them south. I've been deploying, both for my
| solar and for some other residential projects I'm helping
| with, east-west facing panels, to get production up as
| early in the morning as possible and run it late. You get
| less kWh per panel than south facing, but you get a
| system that, on a good day, is producing from sunup to
| sundown, even when those set far north of east/west. Out
| here, peak days are almost 45 degrees north of E/W for
| sunrise/sunset.
|
| Iron Ridge XR1000 and some locally welded frames work
| pretty darn well for this sort of thing, if you have the
| ground area for it.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Why can't you put the panels on an electric swivel? I
| assume it's significantly more expensive? Why?
| walrus01 wrote:
| A sun tracking ground mount that goes on a steel pole and
| can take the wind loading of just six 1.65 x 1.0 meter
| size 60 cell panels costs considerably more to buy, ship
| and install than the panels themselves. These days if you
| need more kWh per month your money is much better spent
| buying more fixed mount panels.
| m463 wrote:
| I always liked perusing https://sunelec.com because they
| have interesting per-pallet or per-container pricing
|
| plentiful wattage would be an interesting DIY project.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I also use sunelec as a general small quantity pricing
| benchmark, but for the west coast, their prices can be
| matched from several distributors that ship from
| California warehouses.
| coryrc wrote:
| Do you have some recommendations?
| pfdietz wrote:
| A world powered by PV will be mostly powered by larger
| scale ground mounted PV, not by PV on the roofs of homes
| and businesses.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| But roof PV makes the grid more resilient, requires less
| grid, and the owners more independent. A huge portion of
| consumer electricity could be served with rooftop. It
| should scale with hot sunny days for A/C surges. It may
| be key to not overloading the grid with true mass market
| BEV adoption.
|
| And the article seems to miss that wind is still beating
| solar from the LCOE charts I've seen. They keep making
| the towers taller and taller for better economies of
| scale.
| rocqua wrote:
| In Europe, roof PV is actually making the grid worse off
| when residential areas become over-producers. The
| capacity is not available to move the peak solar power
| away from residential areas or between residential areas.
| The grid is apparently designed for top down generation.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I don't think overproduction will be as big an issue once
| BEVs and cheaper home storage (sodium ion or other means)
| hit the mainstream.
|
| Reverse metering is basically a shadow subsidy.
|
| And I'm not arguing that the grid doesn't need to be
| adapted or needs work, but if we have a lot of home
| generation, then we don't need to worry as much about
| increasing overall grid capacity to handle BEV home
| charging.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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.
| o_1 wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Land is just an example, running new HV power lines from
| ultra cheap land to consumers is another cost that's not
| dropping.
|
| If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum
| theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10%
| annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more
| realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum
| the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > out to be closer to the PV fields
|
| All those crazy people moving to AZ and NV in the US did
| something right. Their energy costs to AirCon is going to
| need it.
|
| But actually this seems like it would position well
| certain parts of the US that are growing (sun belt).
| UncleEntity wrote:
| It helps out a bunch that there is a nuclear power plant
| outside of Phoenix and the Hoover dam in Vegas generating
| all kinds of carbon-free electricity to power the air
| conditioning.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We can shift production from port cities with expensive
| energy to port cities with cheap energy.
| PeterisP wrote:
| A good example is aluminum production in Iceland, which
| has a disproportionally huge aluminum refining industry
| (it makes almost as much aluminum as the whole of USA
| despite having literally 1000 times smaller population)
| simply due to the availability of cheap energy and access
| to ocean shipping.
| adrianN wrote:
| You'd need to move the people too. That can work, but it
| will take some time to do.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Wow shoutout to insolation being an amazing word
| Terr_ wrote:
| I get the feeling that one could shorten it to "solation"
| and it would still have the same meaning, etymologically-
| speaking.
|
| Like inflammable/flammable.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Exsolation might find a use. Big mirrors at L2 to reflect
| sunlight to solar farms at night? They would need to
| focus _very_ precisely, from a million miles off.
| danaris wrote:
| I would think "exsolation" would either be
|
| a) what the sun does
|
| or b) a potential (though IMO somewhat nutty)
| geoengineering project to simply reflect a bunch of
| sunlight back into space before it heats us up.
|
| What you're describing sounds like maybe "resolation"?
| (Though also sounds like it's increasing the total amount
| of insolation, and thus would accelerate climate
| change...it's actually very similar to the soletta mirror
| designed to do exactly that, described in Lois Bujold's
| _Komarr_, part of the Vorkosigan space-opera saga.)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Hah, just re-read (or to be precise, re-audiobook-
| listened) to Komarr last week. I kind of want a side-
| novel following Auditor Vorthys now... although I imagine
| he's already something of a time-seasoned Leo Graf.
| kortex wrote:
| Wouldn't exsolation just be albedo and/or radiative
| cooling?
| l1n wrote:
| Because their value prop is to generate synthetic fuel instead.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| You need synthetic fuel anyway to act as energy
| storage/buffer.
| jonatron wrote:
| https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ not Libya, but
| Morocco.
| ben_w wrote:
| A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The
| problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross
| section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV),
| and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper
| production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a
| worse conductor).
|
| Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and
| the cables' combined cross sections may need to be less
| (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or
| more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
|
| Downside is that's still order-of a few trillion dollars, close
| to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global
| overnight only), and we're likely to make those batteries
| anyway for the electric cars and when their condition
| deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still
| good enough for grid storage.
| nine_k wrote:
| Superconducting power transmission was first implemented back
| in 2014 [1]. Some progress has been made since then [2].
|
| I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting
| materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and
| liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds
| of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than
| land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a
| gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
|
| [1]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-
| first-...
|
| [2]: https://energycentral.com/news/shanghai-opens-world-
| leading-...
| ben_w wrote:
| I like superconductors, and I certainly hope they'll become
| viable, but "hundreds of miles" is a factor of at least 120
| short of what's needed, and land for a GW of PV isn't
| _that_ expensive even in western Europe, especially as PV
| can be present in pastureland at the same time as the
| animals.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| A lovely idea, but it will not happen anytime soon because
| states consider energy independence to be of existential
| geopolitical importance.
| lotharcable wrote:
| Money != Wealth
|
| You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off
| everything they own and hand it to the government and all you
| end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
|
| That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will
| be gone. There won't be new ones.
|
| And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages.
| It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of
| copper lines.
|
| Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million
| acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is
| that going to come from?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The communists have repeatedly done the equivalent, which
| is nationalizing industries. It never, ever produced better
| results.
| 8note wrote:
| Aramco has done great though
| walrus01 wrote:
| Government owned, government built, government run
| _regional_ monopoly electricity generators in North
| America are already the absolute cheapest dollars per
| kilowatt hour in the continent.
|
| It's not communism.
|
| I am referring to hydro quebec, and to the hydroelectric
| dams in central Washington State.
|
| Would you claim that if we had let the free market build
| those hydroelectric dams using private capital instead,
| that we would have better results right now?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Most dams are privately owned.
|
| https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema_liv
| ing...
| defrost wrote:
| "never ever" is both a strong claim and ridiculous.
|
| I'll take the Australian Snowy River Hydro scheme over
| the mess in Texas any day.
| WalterBright wrote:
| How about the California power system?
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| I find the one in Texas much more impressive.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/preliminary-
| report-l...
|
| _While Texans froze and natural gas-fired power plants
| tripped offline during a February cold snap, natural gas
| traders and pipeline companies made up to $11 billion in
| just nine days._
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/11-billion-
| in-9-...
|
| _"I will say we understand that it would be unacceptable
| to just have customers bear the cost on their monthly
| bill and as if anybody could pay for that," Gold-Williams
| said. "So we are working diligently - the financial
| services team is working diligently, trying to figure out
| ways to truly spread that cost, potentially maybe, you
| know 15 - I mean, 10 years or longer to try to make it
| affordable. We don't have that fully assessed."_
|
| https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/02/19/skyrocketing-
| pric...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I would claim that, yes, private capital would generate
| power more cheaply with those dams, but that isn't the
| only reason those dams are there. They serve several
| alternative functions (ie preventing flooding, keeping
| lakes full) that a free marketeer would not do.
|
| However, dams are cheap enough for power generation that
| even with government inefficiency involved in their
| construction and operation, the power is so cheap that it
| doesn't matter.
| 8note wrote:
| As a limiting case, a private system can't do it cheaper
| than a public one. A private system needs to skim profits
| off the top, which will always limit how cheap it can go
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| "Your margin is my opportunity." ~Jeff Bezos
|
| Private is cheaper if there is competition. Monopolies
| are always more costly, public or private.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| "You cheap, underpaid labor is my wealth. Thanks for the
| trip to space, nerds." - Jeff Bezos
| ben_w wrote:
| Private is not _always_ cheaper -- the NHS comes to mind
| as a counter-example, and is cheaper in part because the
| British government gets to act as a monopsony.
|
| While competition can indeed help illuminate new
| solutions, competition can also come in the form of
| different political parties and international
| comparisons.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I thought that question got empathically answered when
| Ontario hydro was privatized and split and went to hell
| together with our electricity prices.
|
| Same with Ontario vs Manitoba or Quebec car insurance
| etc. Some things just suck when they're privatized - they
| focus on short term gain and end up with lousy infra and
| long term preparedness. I think HN has a pretty solid
| consensus on private telecom monopolies vs municipal
| fiber as well.
|
| Back to topic, I thought most of usa private power
| monopolies are basically in dire straits from infra
| upkeep and maintenance and grid - there's a lot of bright
| knowledgeable folks on HN so I would genuinely appreciate
| comment if I'm way off base in my ignorant ways.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I read recently that Mexico was nationalizing part of its
| electric grid and user prices were expected to rise as a
| result.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Found it:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-energy-cfe-
| obrador-11655...
| Aeolun wrote:
| > that we would have better results right now?
|
| Think of the shareholders!
|
| All that lost value could have gone to line their
| pockets, but instead it's being used for the good of
| society (to be fair, probably to those same shareholders
| through different companies at exorbitant rates).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > All that lost value could have gone to line their
| pockets, but instead it's being used for the good of
| society
|
| That is indeed the pitch the communists make. How is that
| working out for them?
| zapataband1 wrote:
| You mean like china who has 10,000 high speed rails
| running every day producing the cheapest PV cells and
| lifted their population out of poverty? Let's just let
| Elon Musk get richer at the 3 trillion dollar mark he
| might let us have ONE tunnel.
| rfrey wrote:
| It's working out great for the communist governments of
| Quebec and Washington State. The communists in Norway
| also seem to be doing ok.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The communists in Norway, like Russia, benefit enormously
| from pumping oil out of the ground, which goes to the
| government. In Norway's case, it's 20% of the GDP.
| Probably much more today with all the oil price
| increases.
| Teever wrote:
| Can you comment on the communists of Quebec? As a
| Canadian, this is what I find lacking in debate on
| American sites like Reddit or HN.
|
| Canada is very similar to the United States, another way
| of saying that is that Canada does things slightly
| different yet the results seem to be profoundly different
| than the States.
|
| Why is that, and what are we as Canadians doing that
| Americans and others around the world should attempt to
| copy and improve upon?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know next to nothing about Quebec, and so cannot
| contribute anything there.
| vasco wrote:
| Quebec has a communist government? Wikipedia tells me
| liberal / constitutional monarchy.
| danaris wrote:
| 'Twas a bit of sarcasm in response to WalterBright's
| overly broad characterization of "communism".
| Teever wrote:
| jprd wrote:
| It isn't, not when there is a better _commercial_ system
| in the world. If the "invisible hand" was real, great. As
| it has been a constantly manipulated and managed
| construct within the world of global finance from the
| moment Adam Smith shared it with anyone, it completely
| ceased to have any meaning going forward other than
| license to savage.
|
| Economics isn't science or maths when you get past the
| micro level. It is psychology.
|
| If there is a Capitalist society that also has a deep
| respect for mental health, I say it only exists in
| Science Fiction from the 50s and 60s.
|
| The _goals_ of communism are pure and true, but insanely
| unrealistic considering we 're talking about humans who
| still instinctually believe in a reality where scarcity
| is anything other than a human construct.
|
| On the other hand, naturally, barely restrained
| capitalism is just going to be a giant cancer where the
| rich feast off the poor until it all goes down in flames.
|
| What's needed is a shared sense of morality, community
| and survival across our species.
|
| History says we're fucked.
| rfrey wrote:
| The notion that government supplied infrastructure, which
| _enables_ private industry to flourish, is somehow
| communist, would probably make even Ayn Rand pause for a
| second. From roads to electricity to clean water,
| government infrastructure has been part of the American
| success story since the 18th century.
|
| It's only the radical "right wing" (scare quotes because
| they bear no resemblance to "right wing" thought from
| before the 90s) that have challenged the government role
| in giving American industry the tools they need for
| success.
|
| To call government funded infrastructure "communist" is
| the clearest illustration of the Overton Window I think
| I've ever seen.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Show me any large scale infrastructure project that has
| been realized by private enterprises without massive
| government subsidies. How is your privately funded
| highway or rail system working out for you?
| Aeolun wrote:
| > How is your privately funded highway or rail system
| working out for you?
|
| Well, we get lovely toll gates about every 10 miles.
| Happily they've been automated so you can more or less
| just cruise on, but the constant "that'll be $3, that'll
| be $4, that'll be $3.50" while you are driving can get on
| your nerves.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| France is buying out the remainder of EDF (France's
| commercial nuclear fleet operator) for EUR10 billion, so
| we're going to get another chance to observe the
| experiment.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-
| to-p...
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| It's not going to be any different. They're buying EDF
| because the current situation of their nuclear capacity
| is a shitshow.
| distances wrote:
| How is this related to the parent comment? I don't get what
| you are talking about here.
| walrus01 wrote:
| >Because when the government goes and says "I need 40
| million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that?
| Where is that going to come from?
|
| 1) the empty arid land where we would put 40 million acres
| of solar panels is for the most part already owned by a
| state or national level government. go look at a map of how
| much of nevada is controlled by the BLM for instance.
|
| 2) governments already pay for electrical generation
| through nuclear power plants, building hydroelectric dams,
| etc. the question would be to apply that same money to
| building giant ground mount PV instead.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Arid land will soon be recognized as the worst place to
| put solar farms.
| otikik wrote:
| Those billionaires will no longer be buying politicians in
| the following years either. Perhaps it's worth doing just
| for that effect alone.
| Aeolun wrote:
| We don't need to shift all necessary electricity from one end
| of the earth to the other right? Just the shortfall that a
| large number of batteries cannot deal with overnight.
| zbrozek wrote:
| While your house wiring is typically copper, transmission and
| distribution wiring isn't. That's very-often aluminum. And as
| you point out, we make a huge amount of the stuff.
| ben_w wrote:
| 20.6 MT copper/year vs 64 MT aluminium/year, even using
| _both_ that 's still equivalent to about 17 years of
| current global production (which is a big but not
| impossible change over the timescales desired), but the
| price is still painful.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Aluminum has higher specific conductivity than copper by
| mass. So if you think you need 1 MT of copper
| conductivity, you can do the job with 0.5 MT of aluminum.
|
| Aluminum is also quite abundant. Rate limits will be
| political rather than production. That's not to say this
| is a realistic idea or that it's worth doing, just that
| it isn't unthinkable on a resource basis.
|
| https://www.anixter.com/en_us/resources/literature/wire-
| wisd...
| kortex wrote:
| Aluminum production is also tightly coupled to
| electricity production, so cheaper power could lead to
| cheaper aluminum in a positive feedback loop.
| rocqua wrote:
| Did you take into account that transmission cables are
| usually hollow? Due to the skin effect, most current runs
| through the edge of a cable, so by hollowing out the cable
| you can remove a part that doesn't carry much current.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't know of any long distance HV AC or DC transmission
| lines that use copper. It's all aluminum already.
| tclancy wrote:
| I've heard it's all ball bearings but that may be outdated.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Meaning that coal transported by train is still a major
| energy source? Globally that is still accurate
| unfortunately.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I doubt copper would be used in that kind of thing. It's
| worse, but not that much worse.
|
| Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so.
| There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries
| without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent
| a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the
| tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn
| out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air,
| etc.
| ncmncm wrote:
| A clear majority of utility storage will not be batteries,
| just because cheaper methods will be favored.
|
| The cheapest will rely on E = Fx, where F is air pressure,
| or gravity, or buoyancy. But liquified anhydrous ammonia,
| despite being more costly to make, will be extremely
| popular because it is easy to transport and store, and is
| fantastically useful for many purposes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Copper is used in applications where the conductor is
| volume constrained. Transmission lines are not volume
| constrained, they are mass constrained. Aluminum is
| superior there: its electrical conductivity divided by
| density is higher than copper.
| adaml_623 wrote:
| The good news is that humanity has saved up a few trillion
| for emergencies. The bad news is that it's been saved up and
| hidden in tax havens. Pity
| robocat wrote:
| Money is a river, not a lake.
| WalterBright wrote:
| High taxes always drive capital away into unproductive tax
| havens.
|
| Reagan's achievement was to eliminate tax shelters in
| exchange for lower tax rates. This pulled the investment
| out of those unproductive shelters into productive
| activities, leading to the prosperity of the 80s.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > High taxes always drive capital away into unproductive
| tax havens.
|
| Citation needed. Show me data that demonstrates that use
| of tax havens is correlated to tax rates. The data over
| the last 30-40 years at least at first glance seems to
| disagree. Tax rates (in particular top income bracket,
| capital gains and corporate taxes) have continously
| reduced, while the amount of money in tax havens has
| increased.
| specialist wrote:
| The revenue corollary of PAYGO.
|
| I support tax cuts being tightly coupled with much
| reduced tax avoidance. Retroactively.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Reagan created and governed on unprecedented peacetime
| deficits caused by his military spending and tax changes.
| If his policy had any meaningful influence over the
| economy of the 80s it's likely the massive deficit
| spending.
|
| That said, the link between presidential policy & short
| term economic changes is universally overstated. The
| government can cut down basic research funding and the
| effects won't be felt for a half century.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My point was his policies caused a shift in investment
| capital away from unproductive tax shelters and into
| productive investments. Eliminating the tax shelters was
| part of the deal he made with Democrats to get the budget
| passed.
|
| That can't help but produce positive economic changes.
| 8note wrote:
| The investment shift being into military contracting
| though?
| andrepd wrote:
| Prosperity of the 80s? You mean the era that signalled
| the end of the post-war golden age of capitalism and
| brought about hyper-financialisation (which led us to the
| 2008 catastrophe from which we still haven't recovered)
| and the decline of tax progressiveness and public
| services (which supercharged wealth inequality back to
| gilded age levels)?
|
| Many of our current problems can be traced back to
| changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.
|
| Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name.
| Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go
| up.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Decline of public services? Government social spending
| has increased enormously since the 80s.
|
| I'm amused you're blaming 2008 on Reagan.
| badpun wrote:
| When you deregulate stuff, the catastrophic results
| usually don't come immediately. If they were to come
| immediately, it would be blatantly obvious to everyone
| that it's a bad idea, and hence deregulation wouldn't
| happen. So, in practice, most of deregulation happens in
| areas where it's good for short-term and bad/catastrophic
| for long-term.
| pas wrote:
| the problem is the allocation of the resources in the real
| economy. the copper production goes somewhere currently. if
| half of that suddenly would go to making these super long
| distance cables that would cause brutal inflation for a lot
| of things that depend on copper. (sure, eventually it would
| increase supply too.)
| eternityforest wrote:
| A lot of copper goes to nonelectrical uses that could
| probably go away.
|
| Whenever I see something mechanical made of bronze or
| something it always looks like a real waste. New finishes
| and coatings look pretty good and composites are strong
| and corrosion resistant, and steel is cheaper.
|
| Not everything can be replaced but some can.
| dranudin wrote:
| You should try a copper pan. They are great! Copper is
| also a very effective conductor of heat.
| kortilla wrote:
| What a bad take. The US alone effectively created that much
| money out of thin air during the pandemic. All of the
| countries combined printed far more.
|
| Doing the same for an energy project that might actually
| pay back (unlike the covid losses) is far less disruptive.
|
| Finally, the amount of money hidden away in tax havens by
| the rich is nothing compared to this. Don't drag down
| something as important as the climate crisis with some
| smooth brained class warfare.
| billiam wrote:
| People that charge class warfare just don't want anything
| to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by
| burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE from
| the Fed.
| pydry wrote:
| It's only fictitious if Jeff Bezos is comparing his
| wealth to your wealth.
|
| Try to tax it away and use it for something that would
| benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less
| abstract to him.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It would become a lot less real too. The wealth of people
| who mostly get it from stock ownership is a complete
| fiction, driven by the scarcity of shares on the open
| market. If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding in AMZN
| shares, the whole company would be worth a lot less. Not
| due to any sort of magical effect of Jeff Bezos, but due
| to the market being flooded with supply.
| pydry wrote:
| I guess this means if a hypothetical Bill Gates sold off
| the vast majority of the 45% of Microsoft stock he owned
| then the company would then be worth a lot less?
|
| It really is weird how frequently I see the view you
| espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider
| the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so
| completely disproves it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| So you think that Microsoft stock price wouldn't go down
| significantly if Bill Gates put 45% of the company up for
| sale?
| pydry wrote:
| IIRC put 44% of the company up for sale over a period of
| many years and the price of microsoft stock did indeed go
| up during that time.
|
| So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The hypothetical was about selling them all at once, or a
| very short period of time.
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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 you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point
| is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock
| of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for
| cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you
| or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would
| actually only get a fraction of the nominal value
| ascribed to them.
|
| Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade,
| and if the business avruay survives that long at its
| current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't),
| then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they
| theoretically own.
| coob wrote:
| He sold most of his MSFT in 2020 when stepping down from
| the board.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| By that time, he had sold almost all of MSFT. He was a
| ~2% owner. That sale was a lot more similar in scale to a
| hedge fund selling a large block of shares than to Jeff
| Bezos liquidating his holdings.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In 2020, as I understand it, Bill gates sold less than 1%
| of MSFT on the open market there: his holding went from a
| bit over 2% to a bit over 1%. He had been steadily
| selling over the last two decades.
|
| Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or
| Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's
| holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's.
|
| When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do
| it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't
| sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares
| to buy Twitter.
| pydry wrote:
| 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
| pumped into the public consciousness.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| Yeah, fair point.
|
| Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is
| comprehensively disproved.
| 8note wrote:
| Haven't the covid losses already paid back? We aren't in
| absolute catastrophe
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| What a one sided take - there's no reason that both can't
| be real problems.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > The US alone effectively created that much money out of
| thin air during the pandemic. All of the countries
| combined printed far more.
|
| The difference being that most of that money ended up in
| rich people's pockets, and are now causing a global
| economic crisis.
| anu7df wrote:
| I am not sure of that. If all that money ended up in rich
| people's pocket, never to see the light of day again we
| won't be having the inflation crisis. The money through
| various investments is now out in the open, driving up
| inflation. It is still unequally distributed and that is
| causing issues. If there was a magical way to distribute
| that money equally between everyone inflation won't be an
| issue. Unfortunately magic isn't real.
| adrianN wrote:
| Rich people don't keep their money under the mattress.
| It's invested in assets that make it available to the
| economy.
| ben_w wrote:
| I don't claim to know the full causes of the current
| inflation issues, but inflation can also be caused by a
| reduction in productivity, not just by an increase in
| money supply.
| adrianN wrote:
| If you used the money to build renewable infrastructure,
| most of the money would still end up in rich people's
| pockets, because typically it's rich people who own the
| means of producing infrastructure.
| elihu wrote:
| I'm curious if anyone knows the cost/benefit analysis of HVDC
| over aluminum cables versus using high-temperature
| superconductors like ReBCO tape. Maybe supply of yttrium is a
| bottleneck preventing large-scale use of ReBCO?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| High voltage solves a lot of materials problems for wires.
| I assume that almost everything about superconductors is
| expensive to do, not just the raw materials, which makes it
| too costly (in both energy and money) to use them as wires.
| elihu wrote:
| I assume there's a really high fixed cost involved in
| creating a cable installation that's insulated and
| continuously chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures, but
| maybe there's a break even point if the amount of current
| you're moving is large enough? I mean, if you're
| comparing with an aluminum or copper cable with a cross
| section measured in meters, that isn't cheap either.
|
| There might not be a break-even point. Maybe ReBCO tape
| is just more expensive per amp it can transport than
| ordinary conductive metals like aluminum. Maybe HVDC
| lines can be boosted to arbitrarily high voltages such
| that you never need huge cables in the first place.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue as well is catastrophic failures.
|
| Superconductors get VERY exciting VERY quickly if they
| ever quench, and that is a property of the current and
| superconductor. You can't carry infinite current.
|
| They may be more efficient, but they come with a whole
| host of challenges that make them difficult to use over
| long distances or in uncontrolled environments, which is
| pretty much what you'll have to deal with for long
| distance utility level power transfer.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| >The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds
| of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty
| to Europe
|
| It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope
| maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big
| would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered
| entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
|
| The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around
| 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far
| too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at
| least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the
| art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW
| per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in
| parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of
| 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries
| along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as
| well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels
| themselves.
|
| This leads to another fun question - if you want to install
| 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough
| useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does
| the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks
| will you need working that several thousand km route?
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert
| solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km,
| comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each,
| and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them,
| that's 2e5 truck loads.
|
| The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other
| feat attempted.
| tuatoru wrote:
| OK, but that's just an organisation problem. The
| _technology_ exists.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| If it's not economically or practically feasible, then
| no, the technology doesn't exist.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| We wouldn't want to import all our electricity from one
| country anyway, even if that country wasn't quite as unstable
| as Libya.
|
| A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC
| link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link
| project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know
| if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity
| via that route.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| What would be the point? Even getting 5% of our power from
| desert solar would be astronomically expensive, and a
| logistical and political problem of historic proportions.
| All for a tiny fraction of our power usage. Just build
| nuclear!
| geertj wrote:
| Any such system would probably use DC, which would be much
| more compact than what you describe.
| katkatkatkatket wrote:
| Find me a comparable DC link (5GW * 100, 3000k+ miles). To
| overcome I^2 losses, a DC system would need an even higher
| voltage, and we're already talking about a 1000kv AC
| system.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > How big would the power line be
|
| The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a
| power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere
| (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale,
| and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
| philipkglass wrote:
| Electricity consumption in the UK in 2021 was 294.4 TWh:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-
| consu...
|
| Annualized, that's an average power of 33.5 GW.
|
| On http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see in the yearly
| demand view that peak demand for the year was under 40 GW.
|
| This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is
| too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too
| large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts
| (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would
| mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts.
| Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area
| because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
| natch wrote:
| For places and times without sun there are other solutions such
| as natural gas. We are not trying to entirely eliminate all
| uses of fossil fuels for energy; just reduce them drastically
| where practical. There is also nuclear (longer time scale),
| hydro, wind, batteries, and transmission lines, among others.
|
| You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize.
| Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be
| used as needed to suit the situation.
| influxmoment wrote:
| This kind of energy infrastructure is only build in China at
| the moment. High voltage DC, solar& battery manufacturing,
| solar installation, new nuclear plants
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't
| see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance
| transport of power.
|
| Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon
| fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the
| fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out
| of the desert.
|
| I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground
| transport eventually goes all electric.
| jp57 wrote:
| But it seems they need places with ample sunshine _and_ water
| to electrolyze. That rules out the American west, the Sahara,
| etc. If they can use seawater, then arid coastal areas could
| work.
| walrus01 wrote:
| They use vast amounts of seawater, storing the leftover
| brine, or crystallized salt in huge quantities will become
| a problem.
|
| Existing medium sizee drinking water desalination plants
| already create a huge amount of brine.
| labawi wrote:
| Why would you store it, instead of mixing it back in the
| sea?
|
| I guess you would need some pipes and pumps to move it
| away from your inlets, but that seems comparatively
| cheap.
| walrus01 wrote:
| because shoving all that brine back into the sea in the
| general area of the desalination plant causes a localized
| ecological disaster and dead zone of marine life
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough
| renewables generation, considering existing curtailment),
| battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand
| combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build,
| Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin.
|
| Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced
| 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear.
| Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation
| mix accordingly.
|
| https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
|
| > There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in
| interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021,
| of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity,
| according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power
| Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed
| capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
|
| > Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition,
| the total still represents a milestone. "The sheer volume of
| clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable," Joseph
| Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said
| in a statement. "It suggests that a huge transition is
| underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role."
|
| https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...
| walrus01 wrote:
| If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also
| possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in
| tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods
| of time (for building heating purposes).
|
| Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to
| generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with
| cooling loops to air condition buildings.
| billiam wrote:
| A sand battery prototype in Finland is recently in the
| news. Has a lot of appealing features for local energy
| systems. https://interestingengineering.com/worlds-first-
| sand-battery
| thatcherc wrote:
| One of my favorite high(ish)-concept energy storage
| proposals takes the "store heat in tanks of something that
| melts and stays hot for long periods of time" is the "sun
| in a box"[0] idea: use excess electricity to heat silicon
| up to an incandescent 4500 deg F. Later, when you want to
| extract the store energy, just shine some of that
| incandescent light into some super efficient multi-junction
| solar panels!
|
| Sounds pretty wild but apparently scales up very well
| thanks the to square cube law.
|
| [0] - https://news.mit.edu/2018/liquid-silicon-store-
| renewable-ene...
| ncmncm wrote:
| You would better pump in heat, and sell the cold.
| bitbang wrote:
| Isn't this just a variant of what is already being done
| with molten salt solar towers?
| labawi wrote:
| I think those don't actually have any PV in them. I.e.
| concentrated solar to thermal then turbines for
| electricity.
| zizee wrote:
| Cool concept! Any efficiency numbers available? I
| couldn't see any in the linked press release.
| NavinF wrote:
| > electrical heating elements
|
| Very inefficient compared to heat pumps or even peltiers
| for that matter.
|
| > store heat in tanks
|
| Oh I already do something similar at home for sub-ambient
| cooling but I wouldn't call it cheap.
|
| > If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low
|
| IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying "assume that you
| could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with
| these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this
| 'Jurassic Park,' and that you could stroll throughout this
| park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum
| entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle": https://sc
| holar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Absolutely. California alone is curtailing enormous amounts
| of renewables, hundreds of thousands of MWh/month
| (depending on the season). That is literally clean energy
| being thrown away (which, depending on system design, is
| variably tolerable; you're balancing cost, transmission
| congestion, and renewables offsetting fossil combustion).
| More transmission, more batteries, more storage, more load
| shifting (both temporal and geographic)? All of the above.
|
| https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.asp
| x
| WalterBright wrote:
| California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to
| guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates
| remove all incentive for load shifting.
|
| Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive
| at night, and the market _will_ shift demand. There are
| lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I 've
| outlined several on HN.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I'm more likely to be dubious about the free markets
| supposedly unique ability to solve problems than not.
|
| But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling
| it at $200 mwh six hours later.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Solar power gets expensive at night.
| [deleted]
| zbrozek wrote:
| In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really
| expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the
| evening, and really expensive at night.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > really expensive during the day
|
| Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| PG&E also has to pay for occasionally burning half the
| state.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I blame the CPUC for basically everything regarding the
| crappiness of being a grid customer in California. PG&E
| is exactly the result you'd expect to get in our
| regulatory environment.
|
| Our regulators rubber stamp every tariff plan the company
| puts forth, and lets them get a larger profit margin on
| capex vs opex. So of course the optimal strategy is to
| run all equipment to failure and replace it with
| maximally expensive everything as frequently as possible.
|
| Torching the state _is_ the business plan.
| NavinF wrote:
| Can confirm. Rates are 64% higher than the US average and
| 100% higher than a lot of states. I wonder what they do
| with all this money.
| zbrozek wrote:
| US average kWh is 14.77 cents while PG&E TOU-C starts at
| 37.460 and goes up to 48.902. So it's worse than you
| list.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher
| .ph...
|
| https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SC
| HED...
| walrus01 wrote:
| At that price of 37.4 cente per kWh and up I'm quite
| serious when I say that if I suddenly found myself owning
| a California house, I'd buy enough solar to meet my load
| needs, install a shitload of telecom grade 4000 cycle
| rated lifepo4 batteries (4.9kWh is about $1700 per
| module), charging setup, inverters etc and go off grid.
|
| Maybe keep the grid link attached to a meter and 100A
| panel hooked up to nothing if needed for municipal
| compliance reasons.
| zbrozek wrote:
| That's pretty much what I'm doing, and for that reason.
|
| I don't have a great explanation for why it isn't
| happening faster, but I predict a substantial exodus from
| the California grid. Especially so in places with gas
| bans or among folks who electrify of their own accord.
| NavinF wrote:
| Oh wow. Of course I can't login to PG&E and confirm that
| because "Your Account is currently unavailable due to
| planned maintenance". Bunch of thieves.
|
| Edit:
|
| $385.06/1033kW = $0.37/kWh
|
| A couple of servers really screws over the electric bill.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a
| reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of
| the meat here.
|
| > "Terraform Industries' synthetic natural gas process is not
| particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended
| to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar
| power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could
| synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than
| transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is
| the next best option."
|
| Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out
| where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting.
| Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few
| paragraphs.
|
| > "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2
| kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2
| kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power
| from north Africa? Not quite.
|
| > "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of
| production rate, Britain's cost will match Los Angeles' in less
| than six years. There are a few parts of the world,
| particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power
| is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low,
| compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough
| locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point
| where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are
| cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East,
| demand will increase substantially. "
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've seen people saying "Alaska shows that nuclear is needed,
| as wind/solar don't work well there." They don't mention that
| the average power level on the largest grid in Alaska is just
| 600 MW. And Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, the
| northern half of Canada.
| kurthr wrote:
| At current prices, it's already worth fully solar
| individually... just expensive up front. Batteries and
| transmission are so expensive it's worth just installing MOAR
| solar. Connecting to the grid would be $1k/year so (depending
| on rate of return) it takes ~20years to pay off, which is right
| around the warrantee period.
|
| Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid
| summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need
| 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh
| of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V
| at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors
| electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to
| hook up.
|
| I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power
| companies would rather be getting the money for installing
| solar and batteries.
| worik wrote:
| > and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny
| place to another location where the loads are
|
| The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so
| no, do not need HVDC so much.
| walrus01 wrote:
| My point was that maybe we should transport the electricity
| to where it needs to be used over high voltage long distance
| lines, rather than running an artificial hydrocarbon fuel
| generation process, storing it in tanks or pipelines, and
| then sending it to where it needs to be used, and feeding it
| into combustion engines.
| tomxor wrote:
| The article also pointed out that even with future cost
| reduction from scale etc, some things just don't work well
| running off electricity, the energy density of hydrocarbons
| is very hard to beat unless you go nuclear... and for
| things like planes, baring any massive technological
| breakthroughs, it's probably gona have to be hydrocarbons
| for the foreseeable future... so synthesising those fuels
| by short circuiting the carbon cycle in a post "dig
| unreplenishable shit up from the ground" era, is pretty
| attractive.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| On one hand it's an interesting engineering challenge, but I am
| always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an
| ecosystem with glass is "good for the environment". It sounds
| like something future generations will shake their heads at
| while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I'm not saying pave over the mojave desert with PV, exactly,
| rather that a dry salt pan or ecosystem that has an absolute
| minimum of flora and fauna would be preferable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin
|
| creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has
| ecological costs
|
| in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the
| percentage of electricity right now that is generated using
| gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| Unfortunately the inhabitants of the Mojave turned down a
| major solar power project last year because of ecological
| disruption", aka "this wouldn't be pretty on our nature
| hikes."
|
| Perhaps we can use the Salton Sea? It is at least
| acknowledged as a truly destroyed ecosystem.
| [deleted]
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I am sort of a nimby, but there's nowhere wild to protect
| anymore. Thanks Starlink!
|
| I am less and less sympathetic to groups standing in the
| way of clean energy production because of any aesthetics
| issue.
|
| However, I don't live there so I won't judge, though a
| wind farm got knocked back near where I live because it'd
| look like a windfarm and it was the greenies who knocked
| it back.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > It sounds like something future generations will shake
| their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic
| waste.
|
| No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash
| dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating
| landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
|
| This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They
| will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Matter of interpretation. Is humanity at all good for the
| environment? Some would say no. Solar is clean and deserts
| are mostly, well, deserts. And climate change seems much
| worse than having a tiny bit of our deserts being used for PV
| farms.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Pointless to discuss. Deserts are a really dumb place for
| solar farms.
|
| Solar will coexist with agricultural land and existing
| reservoirs, and benefit both.
| dqpb wrote:
| We've already desertified tens of thousands of square km of
| land into parking lots / heat sinks. We could start by
| shading those abominations with solar panels.
| rektide wrote:
| It'a really weird but there's a surprisingly growing base of
| farming amid a solar farm, where apparently many plants just
| cant stand the pure sun & benefit from some periodic shade
| during the day. I dont know how much I believe it but
| combined agriculture/solar use seems perhaps legit to be a
| thing.
|
| Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle.
| There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant
| slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing,
| plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
| defrost wrote:
| Solar panels up high can coexist with livestock and feed
| grass quite well it seems:
|
| > ABC (Australia) RURAL [p]
|
| > Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep
| grazed under panels
|
| > Sheep grazing under solar panels at farms in NSW's
| Central West have produced better wool and more of it in
| the four years since the projects began, according to
| growers.
|
| > Local graziers have labelled the set-up a "complete win-
| win", with the sheep helping to keep grass and weeds down
| so as not to obscure the panels.
|
| > In turn, the panels provided shade for the sheep and
| grass, and helped prevent the soil from drying out.
|
| [p] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-
| farm-graz...
| pawsforthought wrote:
| It's known as agrivoltaics [1]. It works especially well
| with highly shade-tolerant crops like leafy vegetables,
| stone fruits, berries, etc., but also works with grazing or
| arable cultivation.
|
| There are various possible configurations of panels that
| still allow farm machinery to access the crop beneath, and
| the crop itself is protected from heat stress, wind, heavy
| rain, and hail. Shading reduces evaporative water loss,
| lessening the need for irrigation, and the crop has a local
| cooling effect for the PV panels, which improves their
| efficiency.
|
| According to an extended report from the Fraunhofer
| Institute [2], the main challenges are regulatory - at
| least in Germany, but I imagine similar hurdles in the rest
| of the EU. Essentially, difficulties obtaining building
| permits; negation of farming subsidies from enclosure of
| land; and obstacles to connecting to the grid and receiving
| feed-in tariffs.
|
| Those challenges all seem surmountable, and there's surely
| huge promise in the vast amount of land that would be
| unlocked for energy generation, never mind the synergies
| favorable for horticulture in particular.
|
| [1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/key-
| topics/integrated-photo...
|
| [2]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/docum
| ents/p...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Very interesting.
|
| I do wonder how robust these would be to wind
| storms/tornadoes/hurricanes (like we tend to get in the
| US).
| pawsforthought wrote:
| Good question. A brief search suggests hail is the
| greatest common hazard to the panels. I guess they're
| going to act like a sail in a hurricane or tornado.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| > Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle.
| There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market.
|
| Curious if you're basing this on firsthand knowledge? I
| know nothing about solar panels but I've read some
| stories[0][1] lately about difficulties recycling them,
| particularly older ones that were deployed 10-20 years ago
| and are now reaching EOL.
|
| [0] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-
| panel-was... [1]
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-
| solar-...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Ultra-pure silicon is intrinsically valuable. Anyone
| dumping used-up panels is an idiot.
| philipkglass wrote:
| First Solar (the largest American solar manufacturer) has
| provided recycling for the panels they make since 2005:
|
| https://www.firstsolar.com/modules/recycling
|
| https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/prs_agenda/2_krueger_ieee-
| prese...
|
| https://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-
| Solar/Sustainabilit...
|
| German company Flaxres recently completed a pilot scale
| trial for recycling silicon photovoltaic modules from any
| manufacturer:
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/22/industrial-
| process-fo...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Since the vast majority of PV modules that have ever been
| installed are still working there isn't much recycling
| yet. Most of the mass of a PV panel is mundane things
| like glass and aluminum (and perhaps steel for ground
| mountings) that are either eminently recyclable or easily
| disposable in mass.
| megablast wrote:
| Wait until you hear about roads.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| 34,000 square kilometers [1] have already been disturbed for
| surface coal mining.
|
| Two points about that:
|
| - existing energy sources already do a huge amount of damage
| to land (and in places like West Virginia, particularly
| environmentally sensitive land)
|
| - that's land that can already be converted to solar without
| significant harm being done (the harm has already been done)
|
| [1]: https://www.gem.wiki/The_footprint_of_coal
| bilsbie wrote:
| You just space them out a bit and life will thrive all around
| them. A lot of species will appreciate the shade.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Wait until you hear about how we invented synthetic
| fertilizer and added 5 billion humans in as many as 100
| years. Won't somebody think of the _ecosystem_!
| jjk166 wrote:
| Hundreds of square km is not a lot, and the ecosystems where
| these systems would be installed are typically not rich
| havens of life. The US's power consumption would require
| about 6000-9000 sq km of solar panels (assuming ~15%
| efficiency) For comparison in the US there are about
| 13000-33000 sq km of parking lots, 93000 sq km of alfalfa
| cultivation, 69000 sq km of fallow agricultural land, and the
| mojave desert is about 124000 sq km. Yeah with gross
| mismanagement you might jeopardize the survival of some rare
| lizard or something, but it's a very far cry from a silicon
| wasteland.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > 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.
| elihu wrote:
| The problem with covering a parking lot with solar panels
| is that it's usually a lot more expensive than covering
| rural land with solar panels. The panels have to be
| mounted higher off the ground so vehicles can get beneath
| them, they're usually expected to have a reasonably
| visually-appealing design, and all the wiring has to be
| kept safely out of the way and inaccessible to
| pedestrians. This drives up costs.
|
| If land was truly scarce, parking lot solar would be a
| good option but I expect most installations will use the
| cheaper option of just building solar farms a long ways
| away from people.
|
| Solar parking lots also might make sense in situations
| where all the power is being used on-site, and it's
| cheaper in the long run than buying power from the local
| utility.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| 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...
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| 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.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| I suppose we have different standards for what
| constitutes car-centric development. _Even if_ all those
| parking lots were built up, I see a whole lot of pavement
| and not a lot of pedestrian / cycling infrastructure nor
| greenery (I looked on street view). I mean, there are
| 18-wheeler semis on those streets!
|
| Add to that urban freeways with enormous junctions
| ringing this supposedly dense core, cutting off
| surrounding areas from car-free access.
|
| Yes, the city center has some tall buildings. The car is
| still dominant on its streets though.
| tuatoru wrote:
| There's no scale shown on that photo. What is the total
| area?
| walrus01 wrote:
| I've never actually been to that city but that's a mid
| sized sports stadium you see to the left side. Tulsa I
| think is an extreme example, if you look at an aerial
| photo of Seattle from the 1970s there were a ton of
| "downtown" surface lots too, but now the land is way too
| valuable to use for that.
|
| You can also see what looks like a regulation size
| baseball diamond to the top right side.
| kragen wrote:
| The article we're commenting on is about a moderately efficient
| way to transport power from a very sunny place to another
| location where the loads are: you manufacture methane in the
| sunny place and then ship it to where the load is, either
| through a pipeline, through a liquefaction terminal, or after
| an additional process step such as hydroxylating it into
| methanol.
|
| This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
|
| In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build
| ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny
| place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines
| or gas pipelines.
| thatcat wrote:
| Piping ch4 would lead to release from all the inevitable pipe
| line leaks and limit the reduction in carbon emission.
| kragen wrote:
| I think it would reduce the reduction in carbon emission by
| some percentage, but since we're talking about direct air
| capture rather than point-source capture, it wouldn't
| _limit_ the reduction in carbon emission.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| Methane's much higher global warming potential (versus
| carbon dioxide), implies that there's a threshold of
| methane leaks above which the warming would be _worse_
| than if you did nothing at all.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| Doing the math, methane is around 30x worse than CO2.
|
| So say you pulled down 30 units of CO2 and 1 unit of
| Methane leaked (3%), you're back to square one. Not to
| mention the Methane will be burned into CO2 again so this
| closed cycle isn't so closed.
|
| This study suggests up to 9% is leaked currently:
|
| https://news.stanford.edu/2022/03/24/methane-leaks-much-
| wors...
| kragen wrote:
| This is a good point: you need to get your methane
| leakage rate below 3% in order for synthetic methane to
| improve the climate-change situation rather than making
| it worse. Probably the easiest way to do that is to
| convert it into a liquid fuel, like methanol as I
| suggested upthread, kerosene as I suggested in a
| different comment, or ethanol.
|
| At the point where you are doing enough direct air
| capture of CO2 to supply a substantial fraction of the
| world fuel demand, you're also doing enough direct air
| capture to capture a substantial fraction of world CO2
| emissions. At that point you can just pump some of it
| into natural gas fields instead of converting it to CH4.
| badpun wrote:
| > In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to
| build ten times as much solar panel capacity
|
| All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of
| tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say
| 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to
| be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with
| millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized
| landfill.
| kragen wrote:
| If you do the math, you'll see that your worries are
| misplaced. Because you already would have done it if you
| knew how, I've done it for you below.
|
| I _do_ think that _plastering the world_ with solar panels
| would be a real problem, and the logic of living systems
| suggests that it 's a problem we'll have to contend with at
| some point. There's nothing that inherently limits human
| energy usage to anything like _current_ human energy usage,
| so if solar panels are cheap, eventually someone will want
| to cover the oceans and forests with them.
|
| -- *** --
|
| However, that will probably not become a problem for more
| than 50 years. Right now we're only talking about replacing
| _current_ human energy usage, which is only about 18
| terawatts, last I checked, including non-electrical energy.
| (See, _e.g._ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_s
| upply_and_consum...: 162494 terawatt hours in 02017 =
| 18.537 TW.) With cheap 16%-efficient solar panels and a
| nominal solar constant of 1000 W/m2, that would nominally
| be about 120 000 km2 of solar panels, half the size of
| Idaho.
|
| But we have to take into account capacity factors, which
| range from 10% in extremely polar countries like Germany
| and the Netherlands, through 29% in California, to even
| higher in deserts. (I'd be very pleased to have some
| concrete, trustworthy figures on the capacity factors of
| real utility-scale PV plants in places like Abu Dhabi or
| Chile.) So we're talking about 400 000 to 1.2 million km2,
| almost half the size of Kazakhstan. Once you set the panels
| apart so you can angle them toward the equator without them
| shadowing each other, we're talking about roughly the
| entire size of Kazakhstan. But presumably Kazakhstan itself
| is sunnier than that, so a better intuition pump would be
| the northernmost 20% of Siberia, the part where the
| permafrost is melting due to climate change, or all of
| Alaska. (Siberia is 13.1 million km2.)
|
| But I proposed building _ten_ times as much solar panel
| capacity in cloudy places, not three times as much. And
| that 's because, although the capacity of utility-scale PV
| farms in places like the Netherlands averages 10% year-
| round, it's only about 2% in the winter, because it gets
| cloudy. So, if we were talking about a worst case
| conservative limit in which the whole world is as bad for
| PV as the Netherlands, and also failed to store a summer
| harvest of tasty methane to burn in the winter, we need 6
| million km2 of solar panels, probably spread over 12
| million km2, the size of _all_ of Siberia.
|
| If 1 m2 of solar panel modules weighs 40 kg (I'm too lazy
| to look this up right now but it's the right order of
| magnitude due to the glass and aluminum, even though the
| actual silicon cells are under 300 grams) we're talking
| about 240 _billion_ tonnes of solar panels, not just a
| measly few million.
|
| -- *** --
|
| So, wait, isn't that a huge problem? Doesn't that end up
| with a country-sized landfill and plastering the world? At
| 2.4 g/cc and a typical 10 m landfill depth we're talking
| about 10000 km2, which would be, yes, the size of a small
| country; Monaco is 2.02 km2, Cyprus is 10452 km2, and
| Kuwait is 17818 km2.
|
| But probably you'd dig the landfill deeper if you were
| building such a big one. Or pile it higher and just build
| an earth berm around it instead of digging. At 164 m deep
| it would be 606 km2, the area of Chicago. Technically
| Chicago is still the size of a small country because there
| are about 15 countries smaller than Chicago but I think
| "small-country-sized" is a misleading description of
| Chicago. I think "less than half the size of Anson County,
| Georgia, population 22055" is a more illuminating
| description of 600 km2 than "small-country-sized" or even
| "Chicago-sized". I hope this doesn't offend the inhabitants
| of the proud sovereign nation of Palau (land area 459 km2).
|
| But this calculation is under the ridiculously pessimistic
| assumption that we have foolishly located all of the
| world's solar panels in places like Siberia, Patagonia, or
| Sweden, because everybody has moved there, and also that
| they aren't storing up summer methane for the winter. If we
| assume more optimistically that the solar panels are
| located, on average, somewhere like California (29% year-
| round average capacity factor!) and that the people are
| smart enough to store up methane for the winter, instead of
| 1.2 million km2, it's 400,000 km2. So at 200 m deep, 40
| kg/m2, and 2.4 g/cc, we're talking about 33 km2 to bury the
| planet's 16 billion tonnes of solar panels (6.7 km3).
|
| There are, technically, countries smaller than that:
| Tuvalu, Nauru, Monaco, and the Holy See. But there's also a
| pond larger than that in Kennebec County, Maine, called
| Great Pond.
|
| Great Pond isn't deep enough for all the solar panels,
| though, because it isn't 200 meters deep. However, the
| reservoir of Nagarjuna Sagar Dam in Andhra Pradesh holds
| 8.8 km3 of water (312 TMC or thousand million cubic feet),
| one of many reservoirs and lakes around the world that are
| each individually large enough to dump this quantity of
| solar panels into.
|
| Most of those 40 kg, however, consists of glass and
| aluminum, the most thoroughly recycled materials in the
| world, so I wouldn't worry about the landfill. Also, there
| are some 50-year-old solar panels already, and they mostly
| still work, just at reduced power output.
|
| -- *** --
|
| But what about "plastering the world"? Doesn't a million
| km2 of solar panels amount to "plastering the world"? No,
| the world is 510 million km2, so we're talking about
| plastering 0.2% or 0.1% of the world.
|
| But cheap solar panels mean cheap energy, which means human
| energy consumption can expand dramatically. Historical
| societies that had high human development, like Classical
| Greece and Rome, only had it for a small upper class whose
| wealth was underpinned by the forced labor of slaves. Right
| now we use 2300 watts per person (18 TW / 7.7 billion
| people) which is equivalent to about 23 "energy slaves" per
| person. The solar resource is 127500 terawatts, large
| enough that by plastering the world with solar panels we
| could have 1000 times that, with the equivalent labor of
| 23000 slaves at the disposal of each person. The temptation
| to do this, despite the attendant destruction of the
| biosphere and the alternative of space-based solar power,
| will be strong. But that's more than 50 years in the
| future.
|
| -- *** --
|
| Let's consider, as an example, just the Netherlands, and
| disregard the wind energy they've been famous for
| exploiting for centuries.
|
| The Netherlands uses about 100 GW (900 TWh/year), of which
| about 120 TWh/year is electrical
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_Netherlands).
| It's 41865 km2 with a 10% countrywide capacity factor for
| utility-scale solar, dipping to about 2% during the winter
| months; presumably this would get worse if you started
| having to build your solar farms in random places instead
| of the sunniest places in the country. Let's say,
| pessimistically, 6% and 1.5%. 41865 km2 at the solar
| constant of 1000W/m2 is 41.9 TW, about twice world marketed
| energy consumption. At this pessimistic 6% capacity factor
| 41865 km2 of mainstream 21% efficient panels would produce
| 530 GW, 5 times the country's current energy consumption.
|
| This means that by covering 20% of the country in solar
| panels you can supply its whole energy usage with
| 6%-capacity-factor 21%-efficient solar farms. At today's
| high EUR0.33/Wp prices the required 1700 GWp of solar
| panels would cost EUR570 billion, 28 weeks of the
| Netherlands' GDP of US$1055 trillion/year. Installation and
| balance of plant (inverters, etc.) would cost (guesing)
| another EUR700 billion. And then you need storage, which is
| another significant but smaller cost. These costs will
| almost certainly go down in coming years.
|
| You'd have to store methane for the winter, though. Or use
| wind.
|
| This 1700 GWp is 8100 km2 and at 40 kg/m2 would be 320
| million tonnes of panels. At 2.4 g/cc this is 0.13 km3 or
| 1.3 km2 of 100-meter-deep landfill. Hopefully you can
| imagine that 1.3 km2 of landfill would not be a major
| catastrophe for the Netherlands.
|
| -- *** --
|
| Basically your concern is like a kid worrying that if his
| parents buy him a lollipop they won't be able to afford
| this month's rent. It's not _completely_ disconnected from
| reality but it 's way out of proportion.
| Pakdef wrote:
| Are you saying that CA isn't very sunny?
| fermentation wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the
| phenomenon of "curtailment" where we can't use solar power when
| and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels
| from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is
| plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was
| collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you
| have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production.
|
| Of course, you'd have to subsidize it because basic economics
| won't make it work.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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 and placing panels. That makes them the absolute
| best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though.
| But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are
| no transmission losses.
|
| Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more
| :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But
| we should.
|
| I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer
| to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally
| falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to
| get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that
| much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able
| to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly
| leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array,
| a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.
| distrill wrote:
| 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 scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear.
| nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them
| less frequently.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Solar power in Factorio pairs really well with spidertron.
| You can give it a bunch of bots, and an automated production
| line and it just builds itself. The only hard part is to make
| sure to always keep power growing rather than only expanding
| when you need more power.
| taf2 wrote:
| Why don't we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy
| time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point
| that we can store enough energy for everyone
| pfdietz wrote:
| Because they are too expensive and take too long to build. One
| gets much more CO2 reduction per $, and much more quickly, from
| spending on renewables.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Regulated one to be too expensive, subsidized the other to be
| cheap.
|
| The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of
| the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of
| education, and three small scope issues that range from
| unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made
| nuclear too expensive to be viable.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The arguments against nuclear are based on long history of
| economic failure. The same tired excuses are always trotted
| out. It's all someone else's fault.
|
| Money talks, shit walks. The captains of industry and
| finance are treating nuclear like the failure it is. No
| money for this money pit.
| sneedchucksneed wrote:
| Symmetry wrote:
| In the US at least I think it would be better to describe the
| rate at which we add solar to the grid as limited by regulatory
| and grid management issues. The backlog of projects waiting to be
| approved, in terms of capacity, is about as large as the
| currently installed solar capacity. One problem here is figuring
| out the transmission issues related to adding new capacity, so
| it's not just a purely regulatory issue, but the way in which
| grid capacity is added assumed new plants would look more like
| coal plants so there are regulatory aspects to it.
|
| But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to
| make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about
| any of that.
| alex_young wrote:
| Are synthetic hydrocarbons more efficient energy storage than li
| batteries? Seems unlikely.
| InDemoVeritas wrote:
| Is there enough silver to make 300 TW capacity of solar panels?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Silver is not absolutely needed. Copper can be used for front
| contacts, but it has to be separated from the silicon by a thin
| layer of nickel or molybdenum to prevent reaction of the copper
| with the silicon.
| rahimiali wrote:
| could someone explain the benefit of storing energy as natural
| gas? once you burn it, doesn't it result in co2? doesn't that
| defeat the effort? also is natural gas really easier to pipe
| around than electricity?
|
| I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for
| helpful guidance.
| stocknoob wrote:
| Do you want to burn new carbon that's in the ground, or recycle
| what's already in the air?
|
| We have tremendous infrastructure already dedicated to using
| natural gas (cooking, heating, transport, industrial equipment)
| and it won't be electrified overnight.
|
| First get to carbon neutral, then worry about carbon negative.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| My Casio watch is solar powered and the "panel" can't be seen
| becaue it's too small and incorporated in the design (btw. best
| watch ever, <$100, solar, radio, Gshock). We will film print
| "panels" everywhere, all office buildings, all cars.
|
| If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| 3 important take
|
| 1. Is Solar economic viable?
|
| Not sure " Crude oil prices are between $60 and $100/barrel,
| indicating cost parity at between $10 and $17/MWh. There are
| already solar farms installed in some places that sell power at
| these prices, and between now and 2030 solar costs should come
| down at least another 60%.". But $60 is high. Obviously not now
| but just months ago we talked about selling oil for loss.
|
| Freaking is $40 somewhat I remember
|
| 2. The artificial Russian invasion of Ukraine
|
| The tyranny of Russia need 10 years to resolve. And solar might
| work in this decade abd hope his learning curve continue.
|
| 3. Local game to play like river
|
| The play like conversion of solar back to ch4 (methane) or sea to
| river etc only make sense in a few place. It is local.
|
| In fact one wonder why Australia and Sahara desert is not more
| solar.
|
| 4. Transportation might be hard
|
| 1/3 lost to cable. Still as a guy demo you need a hugh solar
| plant farm to do one house. Still need solar farm and storage via
| many means.
| acyou wrote:
| In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a
| closed system requires net energy input across the system
| boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy
| input than smaller increases of concentration.
|
| Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the
| concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target
| concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy
| input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and
| virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your
| process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy
| requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per
| unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very
| high.
|
| For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start
| from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to
| point sources, point source capture will always be more
| "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
| celtain wrote:
| >Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source
| capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than
| atmospheric carbon capture.
|
| Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source
| either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for
| capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate
| carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).
|
| At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the
| atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out,
| whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees,
| something else, or all of the above.
| kragen wrote:
| It's curious that you didn't actually include the calculation
| of what the minimum energy requirement; instead, you just
| assert without evidence that it is "very, very, very high".
|
| In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment...
| explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO2, or 900 kJ/kg in SI
| units. To remove the [?]60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO2
| currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with
| direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical
| minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current
| world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of
| world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking
| climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that,
| maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can
| be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
|
| Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not
| closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much
| energy they require?
|
| Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot
| get us to net negative CO2 emissions.
| usrusr wrote:
| > Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it
| cannot get us to net negative CO2 emissions.
|
| But it certainly can: by capturing on a point source that
| burns biological fuel. Without the burning, all the CO2
| emitted (or captured) would have cycled back to the air a
| short time later anyways. And if you mainly do it to have a
| cheap carbon source to make some intermittent energy source
| you already have storable/transportable (e.g. creating
| aircraft fuel), just about any low grade biomass will do.
| Grass. Leaves. Dried algae. Paper too dirty for recycling (or
| rather: any paper - does paper recycling even make any sense
| in an economy that also burns wood for energy?). When you
| start looking at incineration not as disposal and/or energy
| source, but as a source of concentrated CO2, almost anything
| turns into a useful resource. All that stuff contains carbon,
| and it's all going back into the atmosphere one way or
| another.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, I guess you're right.
| emtel wrote:
| Point source capture is pointless: We need the capacity to
| reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Capturing every
| molecule of CO2 emitted at its source wouldn't solve global
| warming.
| dqpb wrote:
| Electro-swing absorption works efficiently at ambient levels:
|
| https://verdox.com/technology
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| What about the toxic waste from expended panels? Since you're
| going to be using "a lot of" them.
| 35mm wrote:
| I think electrolysing water into hydrogen using excess solar in
| the winter, then using that directly for heating in the winter
| would make a lot of sense.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Hydrogen is quite difficult to store, so one would have to
| factor those costs in the before deciding.
| affgrff2 wrote:
| And not having to store it locally but pumping it in form of
| methane into the existing net could further reduce costs.
| antishatter wrote:
| Solar is a meme, nuclear is the only way we get the grid off
| carbon.
| shanghaikid wrote:
| China dominates industry.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to
| support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.
|
| To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels
| where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath,
| so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other
| hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the
| problem is.
|
| Large wind turbines also need a lot of space to be efficient. And
| you can't just place those anywhere, either. Wind turbines need
| strong wind to work.
|
| Hydro power plants need water flow to generate energy. So you
| can't have those anywhere, of course.
|
| The only reliable and eco-firendly way to generate power are
| nuclear power plants. You can build them anywhere, they produce
| small waste per output and they require about the same space as
| any coal-based plant.
|
| Sadly, you need good experts and no bad luck to operate them
| safely. Otherwise, we saw what happens.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| Agrivoltaics [1] has enormous potential.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
| pfdietz wrote:
| > What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough
| to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind
| power.
|
| We don't realize it because it's not true.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to
| support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.
|
| You need energy storage as well, people have realized this and
| it's being built in most countries. Hydro however is enough on
| it's own, and is in fact also one of the best forms of energy
| storage. If you have enough hydro to cover half your needs,
| adding "half your needs" from wind and solar lets you save
| hydro for the other half (This is a huge simplification but
| essentially true)
|
| >Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything
| where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for
| agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.
|
| I don't see where the problem is. You seem to postulate that a
| solar power plant needs to be built like a nuclear power plant
| and take up a huge area of new land. It doesn't. You can put
| solar where you are already doing other things.
|
| In fact, we could just build solar roofs on existing parking
| lots! Shade is very nice for parked cars and the area currently
| used by parking lots is enough in most countries.
|
| Also, parking lots are not used for agriculture.
|
| I think the real thing people don't realize is just how great a
| solution solar power really is, because it's new and has
| enormous implications. So far most of the development has been
| done on a basically amateur level.
|
| Distributed energy generation and decimated price of
| electricity will disrupt a lot of powerful incumbents, so
| there's bound to be some propaganda against it from many
| sources.
|
| If the claims in the story are true, anyone using IEA as a
| source would be lead to believe that solar has no future, for
| example. But the actual solar developments have surpassed IEAs
| 20-year estimates within 1 year, 13 years in a row.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Crops under solar panels:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=planting+under+solar+panel&...
|
| "researchers are showing how panels can increase yields and
| reduce water use on a warming planet."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power
|
| "As of 2020, the total worldwide offshore wind power nameplate
| capacity was 35.3 gigawatt"
|
| Many areas need large amounts of cheap clean electric, but
| don't need them 24/7. If your CO2 sequestran or hydrogen
| generator or desalination only runs during the day, or when the
| wind is blowing, meh.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Given all of the factors involved to manufacture the capacity the
| author is talking about (we'll ignore labor & land costs to
| install), wouldn't it be better to put that into
| cheaper/safer/smaller nuclear power? It already runs 24/7 with no
| CO2.
| epistasis wrote:
| Run the numbers, I don't think there's any chance of nuclear
| providing any sort of economic competition. Even at hopelessly
| optimistic prices like $7k/kW overnight cost, nuclear is at a
| huge disadvantage to current solar pricing. Much less the
| pricing for solar at halfway through the nuclear reactor's
| life, 20-30 years from now.
|
| Additionally, we have little hope of scaling nuclear
| construction capacity to meet the necessary demand. Whereas
| solar/wind/storage is way ahead and scaling at ridiculously
| high rates.
|
| Spend 5 years building a reactor, and you get a some number of
| GW. Spend that same construction capacity building mines and
| factories, and you get some GW/year additional production
| capacity.
|
| Construction capacity is fixed, really bad, and productivity
| has not increased in years. Applying that construction capacity
| to nuclear is a linear attack to energy production. Applying
| that construction capacity to solar/wind/storage is an
| exponential attack on energy production.
| pixiemaster wrote:
| in WW2, we moved to war economy to build multiple planes per
| hour, multiple landing ships per day etc, all while rubber,
| steel, oil, where in short supply.
|
| we should do this again with solar panels.
|
| a vast overproduction of solar energy would even allow for less
| distribution need, doing away with wasting time&energy on
| hydrogen and batteries.
| jtdev wrote:
| scotty79 wrote:
| This is fascinating technology for turning CO2 into C
|
| https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...
| ianai wrote:
| "Our process works by using solar power to split water into
| hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then
| combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas"
|
| Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural
| gas underground in the same areas we've been taking it out?
| Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little
| carbon sequestration.
|
| (Can't be sure with myself whether I'm serious or sarcastic in
| this one. But I definitely want carbon out of the air...)
| sbierwagen wrote:
| If you're doing carbon sequestration you skip the part where
| you convert it to methane and just sequester the captured CO2.
|
| Given the scale of the problem, something like that will
| (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a
| political solution, eventually every current natural gas well
| will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were.
|
| However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture,
| barring nanotech magic, will be done via enhanced weathering or
| tree burial.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| If they make it profitable to get carbon out of the air which
| this suggests it will get a lot of private investments. This
| will also make carbon worth something so instead of letting
| it out in the atmosphere there will be effort to capture and
| sell it to the solar methane generators.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| GP asked about sequestration. Most of the productive
| economic uses for CH4 require _burning_ it. Liquid synfuels
| are great and wonderful but they are carbon neutral!
|
| You can use atmospheric CO2 as feedstock for plastic
| production, but world plastic production is only 380
| million tonnes a year, while there's more than 1 trillion
| tonnes of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take two
| and a half millennia to convert that to plastic.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| All that gas and oil was once a massive biological solar panel,
| covering much of the ocean, absorbing sunlight, storing it,
| reproducing, growing only to get subducted and stored for us,
| like a battery. For a billion years.
|
| When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert
| water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential
| to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world,
| razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to
| ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that
| without doing more environmental damage than our current state of
| affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you
| have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality
| and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will
| lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it.
|
| If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is
| to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic
| produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch
| process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three
| quarters of the world's human population, along with the
| livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then
| you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon
| dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was
| once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms
| are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed
| that was made from oil.
|
| It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think
| we should do it?
| MildlySerious wrote:
| The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out
| "Population control." is completely meaningless.
|
| You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and
| it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions
| of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the
| worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as
| close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will
| not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today
| we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population,
| and half the emissions.
|
| At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population
| control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by
| no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people
| talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the
| conversation.
|
| What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as
| possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top
| consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it
| is probably more ethical as well.
|
| (Pasted this comment from [2])
|
| [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-
| ric...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545504
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It's not feasible, because our population is only currently
| possible due to the availability of energy. We can't have
| global supply chains, food and medicine moving across the
| world, much less being produced, without oil and gas. You
| simply don't reduce energy consumption beyond making TV
| illegal without starving more than half of the people alive
| today.
|
| It is by no means a solution, that's kind of my point. _There
| is no solution._ We are made of the stuff that is causing
| this. Something like 68% of the bioavailable nitrogen in your
| body was produced via the Haber Bosch process. Most of the
| carbon in your body was produced as a result of fossil fuel
| extraction.
|
| I didn't use the phrase "population control" because it's
| disingenuous. What I'm talking about is culling. No matter
| how you dice it, reducing energy availability, paving vast
| parts of the world to make up for what little energy we truly
| need, you're talking about killing billions of people and
| destroying a significant portion of the living surface of the
| earth. These are _not_ options. And even if they were, the
| environmental destruction would be worse, it wouldn 't even
| solve anything.
|
| It doesn't derail the conversation, it is the conversation.
| I'm not arguing for population control, I think the idea is
| disgusting. I'm pointing out simply that all these pretty
| ideas people keep talking about, when you look at the
| magnitude of the problem, they're not viable solutions. If
| they're not viable then a conversation talking about them
| should be derailed because it isn't the conversation we
| should be having.
| abvdasker wrote:
| Ecofascism is a pretty unimaginative, lazy and downright
| illogical solution to the complicated problem of climate
| change. It's also morally and scientifically wrong.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree. What's your point?
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I think solar panels are a bit more efficient at converting
| sunlight > electricity than the chemical process of sunlight >
| photosynthesis > decomposition > burning fossil fuel. Take the
| ICE that only coverts something like 20% of fuel into motion,
| the rest is lost to heat. The electric motor is far more
| efficient.
|
| You'd need to update your reasoning to take into account all
| the efficiencies lost in the fossil fuel creation and
| consumption in order to generate electricity.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| No I don't, and I'll tell you why.
|
| The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is
| constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is
| constant. Photosynthesis as
| cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less
| efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the
| entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and
| produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if
| you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the
| amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what,
| tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that
| of the oceans?
|
| Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that
| is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil
| fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best
| case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean
| paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and
| that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy
| output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was
| orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I
| would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years,
| but let's ignore that too.
|
| Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another
| hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil
| and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my
| very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process
| the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like
| this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200
| years.
|
| I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say
| I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude.
| You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths
| oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly
| how much environmental damage do you think such a project
| would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more
| or less destructive than current climate change projections?
|
| It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward:
| get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to
| catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy
| that is not required by life on earth, out of material not
| currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the
| lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run
| out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters
| of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our
| decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking
| with wood and cowdung again.
|
| Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon
| sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and
| keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I follow your logic but the sun is going to be hitting you
| for 70+ years. Your body surface area is probably
| equivalent to my 400W solar panel. That's a few KWh per day
| for 70+ years. How much oil will your decomposing body
| produce? How much energy will the vegetation in the Sahara
| desert produce?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| You misunderstand, my decomposing body will produce
| _carbon dioxide_.
|
| The Sahara desert is a great idea, probably our best bet.
| And if we can source all the material needed to pave it
| with panels right from underneath it, all the better. But
| that's unlikely, and still, that's 2% of the earths
| surface. Not enough surface area to cover our energy
| needs, despite what anyone says. If we really have
| reached peak oil, that is, used half or more of the oil
| available to us, in 100 years, that took 75% of the
| earths surface a billion years to produce, paving the
| Sahara desert won't make a dent. Even using energy from
| the sun 100 times more efficiently, that's still 50 times
| less energy than we need, 2% of what's needed, and that
| doesn't take into account increasing energy needs
| worldwide.
| brazzy wrote:
| >Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of
| magnitude.
|
| No, let's say that you are off by three or four orders of
| magnitude. Because your first estimate really is that bad,
| and without it, your entire "argument" falls apart.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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 billion people to
| a point where it is manageable without killing most of
| them. Give me more than one sentence.
| brazzy wrote:
| 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.
|
| And in any case, the problem we need to solve is not at
| all replicating the amount of energy stored by fuel in
| the ground. The problem we need to solve is generating
| the amount of energy we're actually using. And that has
| the advantage that we know that number quite precisely,
| instead of having to derive it based on ridiculously
| imprecise guesses.
|
| And TFA makes a projection for required area using
| exactly this, and arrives at
|
| > 300 TW of solar generation capacity, occupying about 5%
| of Earth's land surface area, and split between roof top
| installations in cities and dedicated plants on nearby
| less developed land. For comparison, agriculture uses 18%
| of Earth's land surface area, and largely uninhabited
| deserts are 33%.
|
| And that completely ignores the additional power
| generation capacity of wind power.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| brazzy wrote:
| > 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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 300TW is 1.2% of 26000TW, not 0.12%.
|
| Where do we get this 300TW number from? Does this include
| heating in winter, cooling in summer, fuel for moving
| goods and people in cars, trains, ships, airplanes,
| agriculture future energy consumption, and the energy
| needed to remove CO2 that has been created as per the
| proposal in the article at the top of this thread?
|
| So the sun shone, for a billion years, to keep it simple,
| 26000 TW per year, and the photosynthesis on the surface
| of the ocean only saved what, projected oil reserves
| another 100 years, 60k TW at best? That puts
| photosyntheses of the ocean surface chloroplasts
| converted into oil at 0.0000001% efficiency. Either that
| or there's triple digits orders of magnitude more oil
| under the surface we don't know about. You believe that?
|
| And suppose that is true. That would mean the amount of
| carbon coming from it is absolutely miniscule. Think of
| the number of tons of carbon dioxide that could've been
| in the atmosphere when the photosynthesis started,
| subtract out what would've been locked up to store this
| miniscule amount of energy, that's what you get, hardly
| anything. We know that's not true, so we can safely guess
| that the energy from photosynthesis that was stored was
| significantly more efficient than 0.0000001%, if it
| weren't you wouldn't have a climate crisis, which means
| humans use much more than 300TW. And that's just
| _currently_.
|
| Wherever you're getting these consumption numbers from,
| they're just simply not possible. The carbon that has
| been produced in the last 100 years outweighs the amount
| that would be released from oil during that time if it
| were constant 300TW yearly, let alone with the
| comparatively small amount 100 years ago.
| brazzy wrote:
| > Does this include heating in winter, cooling in summer,
| fuel for moving goods and people in cars, trains, ships,
| airplanes, agriculture future energy consumption, and the
| energy needed to remove CO2 that has been created as per
| the proposal in the article at the top of this thread?
|
| Yes, it does (and very cautiously calculated). Read the
| fucking article. These numbers are not that hard to
| research, and don't require the kind of completely
| unsupported ass-pulling of numbers you are doing.
|
| > You believe that?
|
| Yes, I believe that. For any given molecule of fossil
| fuel to exist at all is a freak accident with a truly
| tiny chance of happening. In fact, nearly all coal
| deposits were formed in one particular era between the
| time when plants evolved lignin and the time when
| bacteria evolved the ability to digest lignin.
|
| > And suppose that is true. That would mean the amount of
| carbon coming from it is absolutely miniscule.
|
| No, it wouldn't. The amount of energy is just so gigantic
| (which is why we need to harvest only a small percentage)
| that a minuscule amount of it stored over millions of
| years still amounts to a whole lot.
|
| > Think of the number of tons of carbon dioxide that
| could've been in the atmosphere when the photosynthesis
| started, subtract out what would've been locked up to
| store this miniscule amount of energy, that's what you
| get, hardly anything.
|
| That makes no sense whatsoever. There is zero correlation
| between the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the
| amount of energy the earth receives from the sun. I
| really think you have a problem with basic logic. You're
| apparently so enamoured with this hypothesis that you'll
| do any leap of logic, no matter how bizarre, to support
| it.
|
| > Wherever you're getting these consumption numbers from,
| they're just simply not possible.
|
| Lol. You absolut gormless pillock. You just love your
| bullshit argument so very much that anything that
| disagrees with it is _not possible_ , is it?
|
| Here you go: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-
| production-consumption - 173k TWh in 2019 divided by 8760
| hours per year, that's actually only 20 TW. Why 20 and
| not 300? Because the 300 TW in TFA inclue the
| inefficiencies of synthesizing methane from electricity
| so we can substitute fossil fuels with solar-generated
| ones.
|
| BTW, if you don't trust the link above, here's the
| Internation Energy Agency:
| https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-
| statistics-2020... - they use a different unit (Mtoe), so
| here's a converter: https://www.justintools.com/unit-
| conversion/energy.php?k1=to... - basically the same
| result.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by
| David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is
| a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of
| humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically.
|
| Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in
| human compatible photosynthesis.
|
| Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to
| harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.
|
| Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving
| bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas
| (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store
| its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various
| entropy.
|
| But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead
| of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to
| capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the
| majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at
| it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves,
| choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to
| the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say,
| a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly
| controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to
| exact ratios...
|
| Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an
| inspiring subject.
|
| [1]: Chapter on solar:
| https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Without Hot Air and this blog are polar opposites. Without Hot
| Air uses costs from 2008 and assumes that they won't improve.
|
| The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's
| conclusions are horribly wrong.
|
| OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will
| improve from current values.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| While the cost of the hardware has, many factors still apply
| such as efficiency and thusly the total area of solar
| required.
|
| You're right though that the book is not up to date, and
| getting long in the tooth in some aspects.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Efficiency has almost doubled since 2008 but more
| importantly efficiency at non optimal angles has improved
| even more. Put together he's off by about an order of
| magnitude in the amount of land required.
|
| The other factor that is missed is that solar panels are
| proving to be surprisingly non exclusive in their land
| usage.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Efficiency may have doubled, but the book used a very
| optimistic 30% efficiency, which afaik is still quite a
| bit higher than even current rates.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The book used a very pessimistic 10% efficiency for
| panels installed in large scale solar farms:
|
| https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_41.shtml
|
| _If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the
| cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could
| deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the
| maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of
| the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we'd have
|
| 10% x 100 W/m2 x 200 m2 per person [?] 50 kWh/day/person.
|
| I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because
| I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on
| such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it's the
| lower-efficiency panels that will get cheap first._
|
| Utility scale panels today are commonly a bit over 20%.
| locallost wrote:
| People doubting there is enough land to be used for solar
| panels should check how much land is used for parking
| lots.
| otherme123 wrote:
| What trend makes you think nuclear is going to make a paradigm
| shift?
|
| I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only
| it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just
| broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.
| oxff wrote:
| Just use nuclear power.
| elihu wrote:
| Another use of natural gas is to make fertilizer. Maybe you'd use
| a different process though if your end goal is to make ammonia?
| (I'm not an expert, but it seems you'd use electrolyzed hydrogen
| either way, but Haber Bosch reacts with nitrogen instead of CO2.)
| guerby wrote:
| Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around
| 400 EUR/kWh for 6000 cycles at 80% degrations, that's 0.074 EUR
| per kWh out the the battery.
|
| 5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to
| change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of
| the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh.
|
| PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France
| you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year
| so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year
| life.
|
| All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to
| consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or
| two electric vehicule charging at home.
|
| As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar
| production is way lower than the rest of the year.
|
| An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a
| standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it,
| if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar +
| heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no
| way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity
| with home sized equipment (yet).
| intrepidhero wrote:
| I get sabatier and electrolysis but what is a CO2 concentrator?
| Or rather how does it work? I thought that was the expensive and
| relatively unknown part of the process.
|
| Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/
| AdamTReineke wrote:
| Their white paper covers it, linked from their site.
|
| > CO2 concentration is performed using a closed lime/calcite
| calcination cycle, operating at ambient temperature and
| pressure.
|
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
| outworlder wrote:
| Can I borrow one for my Sodastream? :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You may not like the 850degC operational temperature at
| home.
|
| But the cold part of the cycle, that actually concentrates
| the CO2 is fun to do at lab-scale, you just have to buy the
| CaO (and prepare for it becoming very hot).
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Website seems like the opposite of one of their competitors,
| https://www.prometheusfuels.com/
| mgerdts wrote:
| There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it
| seems to gloss over some important details.
|
| > Our process works by using solar power to split water into
| hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then
| combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
|
| Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's
| a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and
| power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the
| wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea
| water.
|
| Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the
| hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination
| (also discussed later) will have their own problems.
| "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
| greenthrow wrote:
| It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water
| than vice versa.
|
| I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons,
| but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so
| ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept
| burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Why do you not believe in synthetic hydrocarbons? What else
| do you believe is a better alternative then?
| greenthrow wrote:
| Your questions are loaded. You're doing the religious
| person thing of "Well you don't believe in Jesus, so what
| do you believe in?" Just because I don't believe synthetic
| hydrocarbons are a good idea doesn't mean I have to have a
| replacement.
| illiac786 wrote:
| The point is "if there is nothing better or less bad,
| then we have to go for it". Shouldn't stop us from
| looking for something better though.
| gibolt wrote:
| Solar is already extremely cheap, when costed out over it's
| minimal lifetime. At grid scale, it has dipped down to crazy
| levels.
|
| As you said, this trend will keep on going.
| leereeves wrote:
| According to a couple of studies discussed in [1], solar is
| cheap, but storage is still expensive.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sou
| rce#...
| adrianN wrote:
| You can easily run a grid on 60% renewables with
| essentially no storage at all. We have a long way to go
| before 60% of the world's primary power consumption is
| switched to renewables.
| leereeves wrote:
| But if you drive most non-renewables out of business in
| the process, you'll have a lot of outages at night.
| adrianN wrote:
| Germany runs on about 50% renewable electricity and
| doesn't have outages at night.
| leereeves wrote:
| I see we're not discussing the same thing. I was talking
| about the cost of solar and storage, Germany uses more
| wind and a lot of biomass and hydro.
|
| But I'm happy to discuss this too. That 50% figure is a
| peak (achieved when conditions were favorable) and
| ignores imported electricity.
|
| According to [1], renewables accounted for 41% of power
| production in Germany in 2021, but only 16.1% of primary
| energy consumption.
|
| AIUI, that difference comes from (a) imports and (b) the
| fact that primary energy consumption also includes
| heating and transport, two sectors that often aren't
| directly powered by electricity yet, but which must be
| before an economy can stop consuming non-renewable
| energy.
|
| 1: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
| gibolt wrote:
| For grid scale, batteries add a lot of value. They can
| pay for themselves rather quickly since they react far
| quicker than spinning up FF peakers.
|
| Real world example, one of the biggest batteries in the
| world likely will be paid off in 2-3 years:
| https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-
| austr...
| leereeves wrote:
| I suspect those weren't included in the studies because
| they aren't grid scale yet.
|
| Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world"
| stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one
| second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly,
| so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the
| grid for one hour).
|
| For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage
| hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the
| equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities.
| And we still don't have enough storage to replace
| nonrenewables with solar.
|
| Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of
| energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of
| installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds
| of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to
| replace nonrenewable generation.
|
| But it is a promising technology. If many are built
| quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and
| scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten
| or twenty years.
|
| 1: According to the US Energy Information administration,
| the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electrici
| ty-...
|
| That's about 127 MWh per second.
|
| 2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a
| total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy
| storage capacity of 553 GWh accounted for 93% of utility-
| scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of
| electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."
|
| https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-
| hydro...
| mgerdts wrote:
| Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships
| makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases
| dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars
| and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad
| idea.
| mgerdts wrote:
| > It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the
| water than vice versa.
|
| That's my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the
| consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.
| johncearls wrote:
| But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump
| out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air.
| There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer
| come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions
| of years ago that's creating the excess.
| mgerdts wrote:
| Except for carbon monoxide, soot, etc., that contribute to
| a variety of health problems.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Gas is (relatively speaking) quite clean, and presumably
| pure synthetic gas likely to be even cleaner.
| clomond wrote:
| But Neutral < Negative.
|
| Capturing CO2 is not 'energy cheap' and therefore it is
| best when and where possible much of what we start
| capturing to rid it from the carbon cycle rather than re-
| introduce it.
| NovaVeles wrote:
| I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are
| near magic in terms of their physical properties and
| electric, as it stands currently, have major problems
| replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).
|
| I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there
| is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is
| going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that
| come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today,
| gains in efficiency from using electric rather than
| combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it
| still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of
| energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles
| for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability
| and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the
| 1970's.
| edrxty wrote:
| Tangential but hits on google isn't really a metric
| for...anything at all.
|
| For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000
| results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.
| asveikau wrote:
| Here we go, a other person in the tank for big potato ...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| This comes up a lot when desalination is mentioned. Think of
| the pacific as a bucket of water. And desalinating all the
| water we ever need adds up to tiny fraction of a drop of water
| in comparison. Now the brine is an even tinier fraction of that
| drop that goes back in the bucket. What does it do to ppm
| counts of things like salt? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
|
| Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues
| for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there.
| For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not
| going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any
| meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you
| wanted to. It's just way too much water.
|
| There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water
| there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much.
| That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2
| miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of
| feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix
| things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount
| of brine.
|
| Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you
| and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that
| would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost
| attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge.
| Pipes and pumps cost money.
| elil17 wrote:
| Not a full answer to this issue yet there's a lot of work being
| done in getting solids (either to landfill or to use for
| something) from desal brine.
| Nzen wrote:
| While desalination requires disposing of all the waterborne
| particulate, the water can sometimes be precious enough that we
| bear it. I heard a radio report yesterday [0] about how
| investing in desalination helped mitigate USA CA Catalina
| Island's direly depleted resivoir. That's not to say that brine
| treatment or disposal isn't costly, more that - so long as
| people are committed to living in dry areas and can afford to,
| they will pressure their local governments to keep the area
| habitable.
|
| [0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-
| po...
| stewbrew wrote:
| BTW the author is the founder of a company called Terraform
| Industries. (Their for a commercial business strangely looking
| homepage: https://terraformindustries.com/.) This is funny
| because there is also a company called Terraform Power in the
| renewable business. The names of these two companies seem
| surprisingly close to me. Are these two somehow connected? Is
| this just ignorance on part of the author?
|
| On their Twitter profile they talk about "Gigascale atmospheric
| hydrocarbon synthesis". Which is an interesting wording for a
| company that doesn't even have a proper homepage.
| rob_c wrote:
| And a lot of so far non existent recycling technologies and
| resources...
| seltzered_ wrote:
| This is an important point. There was a recent article
| inquiring the issues in recycling solar panels installed 20-25
| years ago:
| https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california...
| .
| jeffbee wrote:
| That is pure fossil industry propaganda. There is no cadmium
| in ordinary terrestrial solar panels. The lead, if it's there
| at all, is in the solder and easily recovered by a pass
| through a 300-degree intake process. All of the solar panels
| installed in California, ever, would easily fit in the
| parking lot of Dodgers stadium, stacked to a reasonable
| height. They are non-toxic, insoluble bulk crystalline
| materials.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| "This story has been edited to clarify that panels
| containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to
| landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to
| note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are
| primarily used in utility-grade applications."
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's slightly better but they should never have printed
| it. Imagine writing such a story about the tiny amount of
| lead in a million solar panels without mentioning that
| every car battery sold in California comes with more lead
| than 2000 solar panels combined.
|
| Edited to add: """...Current CdTe panels contain
| approximately 6 g/m2, resulting in cadmium emissions of
| 0.5g/GWh, equivalent to that of a coal fired power plant.
| The majority of these emissions (77%) result from mining
| and utilization of the modules, therefore a comprehensive
| collection and recycling program would not reduce the
| environmental impacts of these panels. """ -- Brookhaven
| National Lab
|
| So there you go. Even if you take all retired utility-
| grade thin-film PV panels, grind them to a fine powder,
| and scatter them in the biosphere, you still emit less Cd
| than a coal-fired power station.
| rob_c wrote:
| One thing is worse so another thing is not bad?
|
| This is the same level of logic used against nuclear
| power, yes if we'd invested in this in the 80s and 90s
| (even the 00s) we wouldn't be having these conversations
| and Russia wouldn't be an energy superpower... I feel
| like a certain amount of "what's going with people"
| because I'm having to grow up with these decisions not
| embrace living through the era that made them...
| kragen wrote:
| The more important point is that panels that contain
| cadmium and selenium are primarily not used at all. The
| PVXchange pricing page stopped quoting prices for thin-
| film panels years ago because silicon panels are now
| totally dominant in the market.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 90% of a solar panel is recyclable. However, it's only
| necessary to do so once the panel is no longer economically
| viable, and panels are generally warrantied to produce 80%+ of
| their nameplate capacity after 20+ years.
|
| In the EU and elsewhere there's a healthy market in used
| panels; when a large scale installation upgrades to
| newer/better panels, the used panels go on the market and end
| up in places where people don't care about the efficiency per
| area.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering
| 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.
| kragen wrote:
| Nuclear power plants cannot operate in the Sahara Desert; they
| need access to cooling water.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| They'd have to use dry cooling in that environment. A bit
| more cost but fully doable. You can reject 375 degreeC core
| heat even in the Sahara
| kragen wrote:
| True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the
| power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could
| even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day
| by using a daily thermal store.
|
| Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts
| of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive
| with PV.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| 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.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| 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
| taxpayers when they nationalize the operator), and they
| have over a million cubic meters of waste that needs
| manpower to manage for longer than France has existed as
| a nation.
|
| Instead of nuclear plants in 0.1% of the Sahara, I
| propose solar panels on 10% of existing parking lots.
| Much easier, much faster, much cheaper, and coming
| generations will thank us instead of curse us. :)
|
| //crashoverrideCIA ;)
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe, we'll see. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't
| seem to agree with you, even though the capacity factor
| of PV in the PRC is absolutely abysmal.
|
| The figures I've seen suggest that the capex cost of a
| _coal_ power plant -- which is basically a nuclear power
| plant without the nuclear reactor -- is high enough to be
| uncompetitive with PV in most of the world now, _even if
| the coal were free_. So I 'm skeptical that GE or CGN has
| found a way to make their nuclear power plants as cheap
| as PV, except in, like, Manchuria or Svalbard or
| something.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| That's not what I heard at all.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-
| cli...
|
| Are you thinking of lcoe instead of total system cost by
| chance?
| kragen wrote:
| Thank you for linking this article! It answers a lot of
| questions I'd had after reading some poorer coverage of
| this initiative last year.
|
| I'm definitely not talking about LCOE; I'm just talking
| about up-front capex. Conceivably nuclear plants could be
| cheaper to _build_ than PV farms, but still have a worse
| LCOE, but I don 't think they're even cheaper to build.
| Even for China, which is the best in the world at
| building things.
|
| This article says the PRC plans to build another 147 GW
| for a total of 200 GW by 02035, over 14 years, averaging
| 10 GW per year. Total PRC marketed energy consumption is
| on the order of 6 TW (6000 GW), though I'm extrapolating
| that from a figure of 28 PWh/year in 02010 and an
| increase in energy consumption of 90% since then, and I'd
| be delighted to have more reliable data.
|
| So the plan is to add an additional 2% to their energy
| supply (assuming capacity factor 90%) in the form of
| nuclear -- over the course of 14 years, during which time
| their total energy consumption will presumably roughly
| double.
|
| In that context this doesn't seem like a huge bet on
| nuclear to me.
|
| The article says, "China keeps the exact costs a state
| secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World
| Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for
| about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt." That's roughly six
| times the cost of PV plants--barely competitive with PV
| in polar and cloudy regions where PV capacity factors are
| 10-15%, completely unviable in sunny regions where PV
| capacity factors approach 30%.
|
| I don't have figures yet for 02021 (do you?) but in
| 02020, looking only at electric power generation, they
| installed 48.2 GW(p) of new solar, 71.7 GW(p) of new
| wind, and 38.4 GW(e) of new coal. If the capacity factors
| are average for the energy source, that would be 6.3
| GW(mean) of new solar, 16 GW(mean) of new wind, and 19.2
| GW(mean) of new coal, and yes, PRC's average coal
| capacity factor really is reported to be just 50%. Solar
| and wind have been rising much faster.
|
| So that's the context in which I'm saying the CPC doesn't
| seem to think nuclear power is economically competitive
| with renewables. It's _already_ installing more
| renewables than nuclear, _even after derating for the
| different capacity factors and including these future
| nuclear plans, which may fail to materialize_ , and it
| has been for years.
|
| What's your interpretation?
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-
| climatechang...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227823
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-
| idUSKBN2A308U
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PV_cume_semi_log_
| cha... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovolta
| ics#Countr...
| laxk wrote:
| The question here is how to distribute it around the world?
| flatline wrote:
| And my 11 year old daughter says that Jeff Bezos could solve
| world hunger if he just gave away part of his fortune.
| Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way.
| thangalin wrote:
| He did give away part of his fortune. Twice. As you implied,
| hunger remains unsolved.
|
| * https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/media/van-jones-
| bezos-100-mil...
|
| * https://www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/press-room/jeff-
| bezo...
|
| I'm working on a sci-fi book wherein a young girl solves
| world hunger; alpha readers wanted (see profile).
| kesor wrote:
| Isn't this what trees do already?
|
| And if trees don't do it "good enough", should we really replace
| the trees with technological mini-chemical-plants that will
| starve all of the CO2?
|
| I don't get it.
|
| Why do humans think their crazy ideas are better for nature,
| while at the same time it is obvious they are going to
| exterminate whole species when implemented.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Trees don't like it when you try to use up their stored energy
| and go and die on you.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Not to mention that we've already made great headway into
| transforming plants and trees into a variety of stable fuel
| sources that can be used to heat and power our lives during the
| time periods where solar panels don't generate enough
| electricity.
|
| Our time would be better spent investing in making these
| conversion processes more reliable and efficient. Alcohol from
| fermentation of sugars, methane from anaerobic digestion,
| syngas/biogas/woodgas from gasification of woody biomass, and
| charcoal from the remaining carbon. All of these are fuel
| sources available from plants that pull in CO2 naturally from
| the environment, completing a cycle of energy production that
| doesn't alter our current CO2 levels upwards. They can be done
| on _waste_ biomass left over from current agricultural
| processes or plants used for landscaping needs (hedges, shade
| trees, etc.). In fact, if you store away the carbon left over
| after gasification as biochar you can lower CO2 levels over
| time.
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