We're going to need a lot of solar panels(caseyhandmer.wordpress.com) |
We're going to need a lot of solar panels(caseyhandmer.wordpress.com) |
Tibet's insolation is really good, though.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
We don't realize it because it's not true.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's a pretty artificial form of 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…)
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.
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.
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.
"Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32208505If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.
Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
"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.
Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.
https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...
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.
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?
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...
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...
I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for helpful guidance.
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.
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.
Maybe not the best idea then.
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
Money talks, shit walks. The captains of industry and finance are treating nuclear like the failure it is. No money for this money pit.
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.
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.
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 60° or 70° 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 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Produce excess methane gas in summer, store with existing infrastructure, burn it for baseload/winter.
"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."
Of course we are not there now. 2030 maybe? 2040?
isn't real
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.
- I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30k€ at least just to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15k€ 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...
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.
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?
Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass.
Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules.
Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.
Utility level solar is much more effective too of course.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
> 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.
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
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.
You're right though that the book is not up to date, and getting long in the tooth in some aspects.
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.
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.
So this kind of thing may only be viable for industrial processes.
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?
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.
Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/
> 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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...
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.
So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.
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).
Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
Ctrl-f "Tree" to find the FAQ.
* 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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
The electricity->fuel step struggles to heat 50%, which is not a deal breaker compared to other sources.
The hard bit is storing hydrogen.
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).
seems like there's a lot of this going around recently
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023
"""
Being developed
> "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. "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
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.
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.
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
The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
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.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
"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.
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
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.
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.
Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening, and it's caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
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.
Those weren’t caused by the species themselves though
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.
A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.
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.
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.
Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
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.
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.
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.
As you said, this trend will keep on going.
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.
That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-po...
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.
For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.
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.
Yeah, Jerry Pournelle used to say on this topic, "it's raining soup, and we're too stupid to hold out a bowl."
Well, now we're at least holding out a few soup spoons, and making some more every year.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I very much doubt you can get higher efficiency by going
electricity -> fuel -> pipeline -> generator
electricity -> wires ->
In particular big turbines are about 60% efficient, ICEs are about 30% efficient and electricity -> fuel conversion is even worse.
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.
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.
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.
What's the purpose of solar farm in Sahara? Lack of a need for electricity (except AC, but not many there can afford it) and transferring power over long distances is not effective.
For home heating there are other energy sources, not as clean (well maybe except wind, which blows during winter also): coal, gas, oil and nuclear.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammo... )
Ammonia is injected into NG in gas turbines to scavenge N to stop NOx production: N is better at binding to N than to O. So, you just burn your NH3 slightly rich.
Ammonia is favored as the refrigerant in industrial cooling systems, but not domestic or automotive for safety reasons.
Ammonia may be burned in ordinary combined-cycle gas turbines and ship engines, requiring only new plumbing, because it corrodes some metals. The ship-building industry is already gearing up for the transition to ammonia fuel. Purely electrical synthesis production capacity will be low through 2026, because factories for synthesizers are still under construction.
The other factor that is missed is that solar panels are proving to be surprisingly non exclusive in their land usage.
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% × 100 W/m2 × 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%.
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
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.
Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.
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 ;)
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.
Solar will coexist with agricultural land and existing reservoirs, and benefit both.
Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past five years of cost data.
Taking a bus is cheaper than flying, but if you want to get somewhere fast you need to fly. Price is just one metric.
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.
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?
I'm taking about specific market forces in the electricity market in the US, not the car market.
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...
Perhaps we can use the Salton Sea? It is at least acknowledged as a truly destroyed ecosystem.
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.
Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
A mass extinction event isn't a line of dominos toppling over, but can be stopped. A mass extinction event is something that has started that can't be stopped.
Luckily, the conservation studies continue, because they understand we haven't entered into an actual mass extinction event. We've simply used it as a tool to drum up necessary attention and funding for preservation before we actually find ourselves in one.
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...
Like inflammable/flammable.
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.)
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.
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.
Ideally I suspect you don't really want utility storage anyway, you want something so cheap, small, and renewable you can do point of load storage and have a bit of grid independence, and not need as much transmission infrastructure.
However, making war less costly (for the victor) could well cause more wars. I believe that before WW I many a war of conquest was initiated by states hoping to profit. WW I was thought by many states as another great chance to profit, but it turned out that mechanization of logistics, and artillery, meant the toll of war was much lower.
Besides, the 'ospolitik' was more about building relationships and mutual respect than an attempt to affect the cost-revenue analysis of war.
Banning advertisment outright is about as realistic as banning humans from communicating.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
Are you thinking of lcoe instead of total system cost by chance?
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_photovoltaics#Countr...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What? Why would you think that?
Plus, people usually oppose nuclear which is an expensive but stable renewable option.
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.
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.
You can also see what looks like a regulation size baseball diamond to the top right side.
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.
The other part you're missing is that this decouples fuel production from locations with large fossil fuel sources (often run by governments with authoritarian rulers who use their exports as leverage). This means that you can spread production to anywhere the sun shines which means highly decentralized, local production of electrofuels.
The third part you're missing is how this increases demand for solar panels and carbon sequestration technology which has an amazing feedback loop that makes these cheaper and more efficient over the decades, meaning that as hydrocarbon demand declines over time as other technologies take over (e.g., electric cars reducing demand from the transportation sector), this built up intellectual capital and infrastructure can be used to just sequester carbon for long-term storage, which would be net negative instead of just carbon neutral.
There's probably more you're missing but I'd just recommend reading more of the blog where he explains everything.
You are aware of the situation in western Europe, yes?
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.
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.
> ABC (Australia) RURAL [π]
> 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.
[π] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
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/documents/p...
I do wonder how robust these would be to wind storms/tornadoes/hurricanes (like we tend to get in the US).
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)
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-...
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...
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
We can do anything that atmospheric gasoline or normal gasoline could do cheaper without any gasoline at all.
Therefore there is no market for atmospheric gasoline, and the only reason there is a market for normal gasoline, is because the costs are hidden for now.
It is not "economic" to live off credit cards just because you don't bother to open the letters telling you how much you owe and you plan to be dead before they come to collect.
> > isn't real
> We can do anything that atmospheric gasoline or normal gasoline could do cheaper without any gasoline at all.
You have now completely exited the original discussion
Please exit argument autopilot
It's bizarro land. It's pleasant enough, but it's not hard to see how Americans and Australians are related.
Existing medium sizee drinking water desalination plants already create a huge amount of brine.
I guess you would need some pipes and pumps to move it away from your inlets, but that seems comparatively cheap.
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.
What I’m trying to say is that this is about incentives, not about how old things are. The modern building let their tenants cover the AC cost while the old one had water heating instead included.
Also, there's a new government initiative to provide incentives and special financing for property owners (who rent their property) to bring the efficiency of all properties up to a decent minimum level by 2030 if they wish to be allowed to continue renting them out. I imagine there may be some exclusions for certain very old properties, especially historical/monumental ones. But regardless, it should have a big positive impact.
The stories sound like comedy: entire block of flats was built the wrong way round, someone moved into theyr flat and found the balcony was missing - the balcony door just led to a 30 meter drop. They forgot to lay cable down for internet, so a new block only has 8 megabit ADSL. The building I am in, they made the holes for fire sprinkles in the wrong place - so there is a hole in the ceiling, but nothing behind it. The sprinkler is 20 cm away from it, inside the ceiling, and if something goes wrong it won't actually be able to pop out
How big is the house?
.. 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 €200k - so I thought, why not 'oversize' PV, if it only costs €100k 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.
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.
https://electrek.co/2022/03/07/solar-and-battery-storage-mak...
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...
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.
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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_supply_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.
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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.
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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.
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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 €0.33/Wp prices the required 1700 GWp of solar panels would cost €570 billion, 28 weeks of the Netherlands' GDP of US$1055 trillion/year. Installation and balance of plant (inverters, etc.) would cost (guesing) another €700 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.
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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.
One more question, if you don't mind - how many toxic materials do these panels contain? From what I've read, a typical landfill is designed to be leaktight for a couple centuries at most. After that, whatever heavy metals and other toxins were in the panels can start leaking into the ground and groundwater. It would suck to leave a bunch of poison drips for the future generations.
Basically silicon PV panels (the kind universally used now) are significantly less toxic than table salt and basically nearly else in your house.
The PV cells themselves contain silicon, aluminum, silver, and trace amounts of phosphorus and boron, and now sometimes gallium. Upon exposure to air or water the silicon surface passivates by forming a layer of amorphous silicon dioxide, which protects the silicon from further corrosion even in strong acids and room-temperature strong bases. Amorphous silicon dioxide is also used as an inert filler in pills, an abrasive in toothpaste, and one of the two main ingredients in simethicone, a treatment for gas pains. If you ground up the PV cells finely enough you could add them to your food with no ill effects.
Most of the mass of the panel is glass, which is also mostly amorphous silicon dioxide with small amounts of calcium and sodium oxides. This you could also add to your food in powder form with no ill effects, contrary to urban legends about ground-glass poisoning.
Gluing the PV cells to the glass is normally EVA, poly(ethylene-vinyl acetate). This is the material crafting hot-glue sticks is made from, as well as flip-flops, mouthguards, yoga mats, and those soft foam toys for kids. Less well known is that it's used as an extended-release drug delivery vehicle in implants: the drug slowly leaches out of the plastic inside your body, while the plastic remains unchanged. It has no known adverse effect on human health.
Sealing the back of the modules is a thin layer of, typically, polyvinyl fluoride (tedlar), which is also relatively biologically inert, but not to the same extreme as the rest of the materials. It's commonly used for raincoats and whiteboards. Hydrofluorocarbons tend to be of relatively low toxicity, but it's not thoroughly biocompatible in the same way as its cousin PVDF, or as EVA and silicon. Some panels are instead made with polypropylene or polyethylene terephthalate, which are as extremely nontoxic as the other materials.
The cells' electrical connections are soldered together with solder. Traditionally this was lead and tin, which does leach lead, though very slowly. Nowadays lead-free solder is used, typically consisting of tin and silver. This is another thing you can eat freely, although there might be traces of flux left from soldering.
The frames are normally made of aluminum, which is extremely nontoxic.
So, no heavy metals except tin and silver, which are nontoxic. Except that silver is toxic to bacteria.
There have been some experiments with nickel/copper plating to reduce the amount of (costly) silver used; I'm not sure if these are in production. Although nickel and copper are pretty safe, they're not nearly as astoundingly nontoxic as the other materials listed above. If you eat chunks of copper you will get sick.
Some thin-film panels have been made with more toxic materials like cadmium, selenium, copper, and tellurium, but they have mostly been driven out of the market by silicon PV cells. The total amount of these materials was small, but it's been found that they could leach out in an acid landfill. But they're not present in silicon cells.
So basically everything you have in your house is way more toxic than solar panels. Latex paint? Toxic polymers. Steel knife? Potential for iron poisoning. Concrete? There's substantial trace levels of many heavy metals in the cement, and it's basic enough to burn your skin, plus there are probably superplasticizer additives that are more toxic than anything listed above. Books? Likely still have trace levels of dioxin from bleaching the paper, plus most of the color inks are more toxic than anything in a solar panel. Polyurethane dishwashing sponge? Polyurethane is definitely not a thing you should eat. Foam cushions in furniture? In addition to polyurethane those contain halogenated fire retardants that are suspected of causing mass endocrine disruption. Wood cutting board? Most woods contain natural biocides to keep from rotting. Coca-Cola? Not only is the fatal dose of phosphoric acid relatively small, and it's keeping you from absorbing calcium, but also lots of the flavoring compounds are enormously more toxic than silicon and glass. Sand? That's crystalline silica, which causes silicosis and lung cancer if inhaled, unlike the amorphous silica we're talking about above. Stainless steel? Nickel can sensitize you over time and cause serious inflammation.
The only things I can think of in a regular person's house that are probably less toxic than solar panels are air, water, plaster, clay, glass, and aluminum cans.
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.
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
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.
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.
This sounds like ⓐ a plausible reason for the Libyan government to refuse any such project; ⓑ 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; ⓒ unstable after a few decades, when Europe's own military forces are no longer overwhelmingly larger than Libya's.
(Don't think ⓒ can happen in Libya? The Eight-Nation Alliance didn't think it could happen in China either.)
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??
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.
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.
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://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx
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.
But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling it at $200 mwh six hours later.
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...
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://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...
> 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”
The premise of the article is that the $/Wh cost from PV will become extremely low, faster than most people think. Do you have a reason to believe this is inaccurate?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
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...
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/electricity-...
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...
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
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.
There sure are. Zero of them, however, produce gasoline or kerosene from air.
Many, many substances cannot be produced in chemical plants currently.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> instead of raging at people
(sigh)
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> 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."
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> its not "not real" in the same way perpetual motion is not real.
I never said anything about perpetual motion.
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.
Until you can show me one that's been built, that remains correct.
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> 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.
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> Don't make so many assumptions.
Uh.
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> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
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?
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).
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema_living...
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.
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.
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".
I shouldn't put solar panels on my roof because it would not fix someone else's problems? What kind of logic is that?
So that's an actual solution to the problem!
Only if the efficiency is 100%. In practice it's lower than that, so reducing consumption is better than increasing production.
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.
Citation needed. This number is absurd.
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.
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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".
yeah, but fossil fuels get subsidies of all sorts, not just polluting for free, but even things like leaving the british taxpayer to pickup the bill for cleaning up old infrastructure they no longer need
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/25/british-tax...
Can fuels by synthesized at industrial scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasol
I'm sure the goalposts just moved LOL
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.
Goodbye.
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-...
I can link to it, but I gave you more than enough information to Google it.
Also nobody is talking about making gasoline from air, just to clarify. The process is described in the linked article, it is the same process as the one that this entire topic is about and it is the one I just described.
I'll take the Australian Snowy River Hydro scheme over the mess in Texas any day.
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...
There are numerous counter examples to your overly broad "never ever" claims here.
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.
Private is cheaper if there is competition. Monopolies are always more costly, public or private.
While competition can indeed help illuminate new solutions, competition can also come in the form of different political parties and international comparisons.
I think it's a good point even if stated quite poorly.
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.
What comments in this discussion are saying is that solar panels won't be cost effective, for some or possible the majority of 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
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.
We need a quote on that. And no, "bulidings last on average 100 years without doing anything to them" is not it.
"Replaced with better buildings" inevitably means "displacing large swaths of population". Because you can't just wave a magic wand and replace houses. For the past 4 years I've lived in a district built in th 60s. So, 60 years ago. If you're telling me that those dozens of building with hundreds of people living in them will be just up and replaced, you're delusional.
Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.
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.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
Maybe keep the grid link attached to a meter and 100A panel hooked up to nothing if needed for municipal compliance reasons.
Edit:
$385.06/1033kW = $0.37/kWh
A couple of servers really screws over the electric bill.
That is indeed the pitch the communists make. How is that working out for them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The difference being that most of that money ended up in rich people’s pockets, and are now causing a global economic crisis.
Something mitigating an ongoing can be expensive, have the intended positive effect immediately, but not be paid back for a long time (or sometimes ever).
Federally subsidized flood insurance is a much smaller scale example. There are many places in Florida and the gulf in general where houses get destroyed by hurricanes and have to be rebuild for $X every 20 years when we only collect maybe 25% of $X in premiums.
Try to tax it away and use it for something that would benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less abstract to him.
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.
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.
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.
That can't help but produce positive economic changes.
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.
I'm amused you're blaming 2008 on Reagan.
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.
I support tax cuts being tightly coupled with much reduced tax avoidance. Retroactively.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As was already explained, no, that was in Dresden.
Additionally I would like to point out that the Dresden plant started in 2014 (not 2013) and it produces e-diesel, this is not e-gas.
2. You're attempting to say that "diesel isn't gasoline," when you previously tried to bring up a hydrogen plant. Stop it.
3. No, they also produce regular gasoline. Stop it.
4. The discussion isn't settled; you've just caught up with the thing I said earlier, that you tried to argue with, and now are pretending was your position. Stop it.
5. That plant got shut down, and no longer produces gasoline or diesel, which you didn't know, and which I brought up before you showed up. It now produces fertilizer. However, its webpage is out of date. Since you're arguing out of a search engine, and have no actual knowledge here, you have no ability to come to the correct position. Stop it.
6. There was only ever one, on Earth, ever, and it was never economical *BECAUSE IT DID NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY*, which was the point I was making before you showed up. This is why I say that the technology "isn't real" - for all your search engine pseudo-knowledge, in the real world, nobody has ever been able to make it work, and you're reciting face-saving press releases as if they're a way to make engineering decisions. Stop it.
7. Every single point you've made was wrong, and yet you're still "I would like to point out" ing. Stop it.
The rapid increase in just human labor prices seems to indicate that money is making it to people somehow because COVID didn’t kill enough of the labor force to have that kind of effect.
If there's many billions of dollars in value to be created, that will trump anything a NGO can whine about. That's why we're still burning so much fossil fuel. Nuclear was vulnerable because it wasn't creating value.
Do you think lobby from fossil fuel companies just sat on their hands all this time?
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?
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.
As the house cools at the end of the day the uninsulated wall will be colder than the other walls and if it's below the dew point condensation will form on it. If the temperature differential is high enough in comparison to difference in insulation between the walls then enough water will leave the air to keep the dew point below the temperature of the insulated walls and so that one wall will collect the majority of moisture (at 30C a meter cubed of saturated air carries about 30mls of water so yes condensation on a surface can heavily impact humidity). Once a wall becomes moist it will still acumulate water if it's below the dew point.
You likely will have seen real life examples of this when you look at single pane windows in otherwise insulated houses and seen them fog up/ have condensate form on them while the walls around them remain dry (if you haven't seen this but have been to houses with single pane glass in your area then condensation won't be an issue where you live).
As to your 75% efficiency point it will in fact have a lower efficiency as heat transfer increases with temperature differential. Since the room has a higher temperature differential with the outside the less insulated wall will be faster at transfering heat.
That is not to say that insulating 3 walls is a bad idea, it will almost certainly improve a rooms U value, but the worse the insulation on the remaining original wall, ceiling, and floor the less difference the 3 walls will make to the rooms U value and thus how quickly the room transfers heat.
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.
Your sample size is too small to make generalisations.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The air will not have more moisture, but rather all the moisture problems will be towards/on the uninsulated wall.
> 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).
Condensation will never stop on a cold wall until all the moisture in the air is removed. If you boil a pot of water the air will fill with moisture, and the entire house will have a high humidity. But because one particular wall is cold because of a lack of insulation the condensation (water going from vapour to liquid phase) will be concentrated on that particular wall.
The condensation will continue to occur as long as you continue to add moisture to the air via cooking and bathing (hot showers, baths).
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.
I'll repeat what I previously said. Power-to-gas refers to gas fuels (this includes LNG), it doesn't refer to liquid fuels such as gasoline. E-gas in this case refers to synthetic methane, it doesn't stand for e-gasoline. This entire thread is focused on creating synthetic methane (the Sabatier process mentioned in the Terraform Industries article), you referred to a plant from 2013 so naturally I assume it's the e-gas plant that opened there since that is the topic at hand and e-gas is a gas. The plant in Wertle is not a hydrogen plant, but it produces hydrogen as part of the Sabatier process. Yes, you mentioned Dresden but it didn't produce the gas this topic is about and it started producing in 2014...
That's the bit I am missing here, it just does not add up, condensation is not something that simply keeps accumulating water on a wall if it's cold enough, there's a saturation at some point. The question is, how fast is this saturation reached? If it's fast, then isolating one out of 3 walls may not create additional moisture on the non-insulated wall.
Sorry, I hope I don't come over as being stubborn, I'm genuinely interested in insulating (I have to do it at some point), I just like to understand things and so far I do not understand why isolating 3 walls out of 4 would generate additional moisture on the remaining wall.
' I do not understand why isolating 3 walls out of 4 would generate additional moisture on the remaining wall.'
you gey problems with mold way before you are anywhere near 'the physical limir of condensarion'. You dont want to be near it.
The question is not whether the amount of consensation will double or quadruple. It is weather you will have mould problems. If your wal starts getting wet, you will have mould peoblems.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
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.
Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.revolution-energetique.com/pourquoi-ces-habitant...
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.
So, you are concern trolling, and badly. That is unwelcome here.
Too, anybody not already handy with putting up fencing is no farmer.
Finally, sunshine really is as free as anything ever, and the buckets are cheap and getting cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
If you look in Zillow you'll see that's very wrong.
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.
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.
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…
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.
https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... has €0.43 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 €0.33/Wp and "low cost" is €0.22/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 €0.30/Wp and low-cost panels at €0.16/Wp. Probably at some point shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even lower than that.
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.
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.
plentiful wattage would be an interesting DIY project.
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.
Arguing that Manhattan is expensive therefore PV doesn't work is like arguing Manhattan is expensive therefore agriculture doesn't work.
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.
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.
Permian Energy Centre is a just completed 460MW project in Texas that uses 1 axis solar trackers. This continues the trend of ~70% of US grid scale installs use single axis tracking, even though it’s a tiny slice of the home market at scale it’s a clear win.
Yes they are more expensive per kWh, but a better match the demand curve means higher profits.
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.
First please define what you mean by "last" so that we share the same semantics and then provide a source on this. And if you mean that a building will have been destroyed and rebuild after 100 years on average then I doubt this claim - after making such a strong claim I think it's up to you to provide evidence.
> I quoted specific numbers on the housing stock which are consistent with that claim
Are you referring to https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge... ? Because if you do, then again, you misunderstand what they are talking about. Also, don't forget that average house-ages are misleading due to WW2 where a lot of old houses got destroyed. So you can't e.g. just take the average age of existing houses, that doesn't work.
> And of course the insulation is not "for free", but the additional costs are usually worth it.
Look, I agree with you - but the way you said it before is so exaggerated and easy to misunderstand that it's no wonder that you are getting these kind of responses. This is a very emotional topic and it's good to try to adjust the language accordingly.
> 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.
It's easy to call someone irrational - but why do you think they don't want this work to be performed. How comes? I doubt that you assume they want the planet to die, so what do you think are their reasons?
Le me just try to give a definition, "lasting" for me means that you only do maintenance and rework that you would still consider the building year to remain the same after you are finished.
Also the semantics of the term "lasting" were not the issue, the issue is that you do not my sources because you find the term economic lifetime and its definition unacceptable.
> Are you referring to https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge... ?
No I mean my number that approximately half of housing buildings are younger than 1977, so approximately 50 years.
This refers to a survey by the government, see box on bottom: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/kl...
Someone else in this thread posted a similar source from ourworldindata which has a bit older data but also shows the same trend.
The latter source also has a more detailed breakdown of building years. But even the former source mentions 1977 as its index year which already alleviates the external effects of WW2, people did not just live without houses for 30 years, the lost housing of WW2 was mostly rebuilt in the 50s.
Also, I do think that your claim is not valid. I do understand that the source I gave for economic lifetime, and also the norm I quoted is acting with fictions required for taxes and accounting reasons. The thing is: These fictions are intended to reflect reality. So I don't get why you are so hung up on where these calculation models originate, as they are specifically designed to reflect reality. If they were outlandish, especially when lifetimes on average are longer, these calculation models would absolutely be changed because then the state earns more money due to lower depreciation. If it was the other way around, the calculation model would be challenged in court.
Of course there is no natural law that a house collapses after 100 years. But not only in architecture, in all of engineering, it usually does not make sense to design for an infinite lifetime. If you double the lifetime of anything, it will cost a lot more money. Why would you spend more money today to build a house with better materials, when you don't even live to see the rewards in the form of lower maintenance and renovation costs in a 100 years. By extension this applies for the amount of money you want to spend in maintenance, at least for natural persons. In many situation it makes sense to simply use up the bound capital.
Now this leads to the following:
> It's easy to call someone irrational - but why do you think they don't want this work to be performed. How comes? I doubt that you assume they want the planet to die, so what do you think are their reasons?
As an anecdote for illustration, my grandparents still heat with oil, but the heater soon needs to be replaced. My grandparents are absolutely stubborn in that they want to replace it with a completely new oil-based heater. The literally only reason is: They are old and don't want to try out something new, even if it is functionally exactly the same (like a wood pellet heater). I literally offered them to pay 100% of the new heating system (reversible heat-pump because heat is one of the primary killers of elderly people and I would like my grand-parents to be around a bit longer...) after they bought heating oil on the ATH this spring and they still disagree. There is literally no economic incentive of looking the gift horse in the mouth, and they are unable to offer any other rational explanation.
You may also skimp on maintenance because you think "I am going to die soon anyways". Or people are planning to be living in a large 200 square-meter mansion with 3 stories until they are 90 when in reality they sell the house at 60 and suffer the loss of value when re-selling due to insufficient maintenance.
And some people just want to live in their house and don't give any thought to it until there is an emergency. Then people will have expensive repairs and still won't think twice about changing their behavior.
Some small house owners skimp on maintenance because they bought their houses as an "investment", and they are dependent on rent income to reliably subsidize their life. Even when the income could be higher in the future with some investments and quickly ROI, they won't accept saving up for it and taking on the economic risk.
Even for institutional housing owners it makes sense to tear down units eventually, even if it is just to get rid of the long-term tenants who make larger renovations annoying to impossible.
There is a lot of small house-owners and in general, most people are just really bad at basic accounting. This is also a big reason why the housing market in general is such a pain in the ass.
It does not sufficiently alleviate the effects of WW2 and other developments.
For instance, the population got reduced to 82% due to WW2 [1]. Also, living space per person has increased a lot over time. I can't find a source for 1945, but here is one from 1971 to 2014. The number of squaremeters per person has almost doubled during that time. [2]
So no, people didn't live without houses for 30 years. But they needed/used way fewer houses overall.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Volksz%C3%A4hlungen_... [2] https://option.news/wohnraum-im-wandel/
> Also, I do think that your claim is not valid. I do understand that the source I gave for economic lifetime, and also the norm I quoted is acting with fictions required for taxes and accounting reasons. The thing is: These fictions are intended to reflect reality. So I don't get why you are so hung up on where these calculation models originate, as they are specifically designed to reflect reality.
You are misinterpreting them. They don't literally say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years". They say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years without doing anything to increase their value". And this is certaily more or less accurate. However, most people don't just let their buildings rot. Some do, but most don't that's why buildings are on average not being rebuilt after a 100 years.
> Why would you spend more money today to build a house with better materials, when you don't even live to see the rewards in the form of lower maintenance and renovation costs in a 100 years.
I find it a bit offtopic, but a very common example is that parents want their children to inherit it so that they don't have to worry about rent or can rent it out for some extra income. Other examples include people who don't necessarily want to stay in the house forever but want to increase the value to sell it later to a higher price. Some people also just enjoy building something that lasts (I am one of those). I think you can agree with that, no?
> My grandparents are absolutely stubborn in that they want to replace it with a completely new oil-based heater. The literally only reason is: They are old and don't want to try out something new, even if it is functionally exactly the same (like a wood pellet heater). (...) and they are unable to offer any other rational explanation.
First, let me say that I understand how you feel about that. I know the situation and sometimes it pains me to see what people do. I would have adviced the same as you. However, without knowing the situation, I think that sometimes in these situations the problem is safety concerns.
The fact that they are unable to "offer any other rational explanation" really makes me think that there is quite the chance that they do have a reason and they are just tired of providing it. If I had to make a bet, I would say they had some bad experience with modern technology in one way or the other. And they maybe also know a time where the winters were cold and heating didn't work. They do not understand heat pumps (not even I fully do) and they are afraid that when something stops working, they are helpless. For them, it feels like a total lack of control over something that is crucial to their life. But would you accept that answer? Probably not. Maybe they already hinted at it - try to remember if they did that and if you properly acknowledged their fears. With oil, not only do they use a technology that has worked for a long time and is much more well understood by them - it actually also makes them more independent of restrictions to power/heating compared to other solutions - at least as long as they have a full tank.
Unfortunately they could very well not be irrational but very rational when considering their situation. Is the decision good? No, I don't think so. But it is not irrational.
Of course, maybe I'm totally wrong. But it wouldn't be the first time that I see a conflict like you describe.
In the end, let me give you some advice to your situation. If you think that it could really be feeling of control and safety that makes them stay with oil, then how about offering them to install an aircon? Aircons are heat pumps as well, and very efficient ones as well (usually more efficient than air/water heatpumps). They can keep their oil, but the aircon might make it able to reduce the oil consumption by a huge chunk, depending on the circumstances. It doesn't cost too much and you even get BAFA Förderung. And on top of that, you can use it to cool/dehumidify of course - heatstroke is also a common reason for elders to end up in hospital. That solution is what I would try in your situation.
> And some people just want to live in their house and don't give any thought to it until there is an emergency. Then people will have expensive repairs and still won't think twice about changing their behavior.
This is not irrational, only lazy. Irrational means to do something even though you know it's wrong. E.g. out of a mood.
Now, with panels sub-$0.50/W, you can accomplish the same thing (more power) for far less money by just putting more panels on. You get less production per nameplate panel watt, but the total system costs are usually lower. And you can push your DC:AC ratios pretty high if you want - cap your inverter out on sunny days, but still get more power on cloudy days. It just depends on what you're trying to optimize for.
I still see trackers on occasion - they're cool. But the only place they're useful is if you have some stiff limit on nameplate capacity. Out here, you're limited to a 25kW system for residential, and you can't exceed your local transformer capacity in panel area - not inverter output (why, I have no idea, I've gotten a range of BS reasons that mostly center around somehow changing the system, blowing up the transformer, and then the power company being on the hook for a new transformer). So if you want to run a large "residential" site (think a ranch or something like that with a bunch of outbuildings), you can hit the 25kW limit quickly, and then need to go to a tracker to increase kWh generated on your 25kW system.
But outside edge cases like that, just put more panels on. The systems I'm helping people with are mostly A-frames, with east-west facing panels for long solar days, and a fairly high DC/AC ratio. I've got 7kW of panel on 6kW of inverter, though I rarely see the inverter past 4500W, which is by design - I don't like pegging out power electronics for long periods of time, and prefer to run things at 80% of design load or lower for longevity reasons.
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.
Im just illustrating the difference between liquidity and wealth.
We had three presidential candidates running on a platform of "windmills are ugly, let's not do that", and at least three on the platform of "nuclear plants are dangerous, let's not do that". I'm kinda worried that "solar panels are ugly, let's not do that" is gaining traction; and I wonder who's going to be the first to oppose dams, but there's a niche.
Remember, we are still talking about the claim that renovation of the building stock takes approximately 100 years.
It does not matter whether we are building more because people need more space, or because houses are actually replaced. All that matters is that the percentage of the building stock built under modern energetic regulations rises sufficiently fast.
This is why this discussion is so frustrating for me. It's all about semantics that don't matter, when my point was actually just disproving a point I thought to be ridiculous (which with the new research I did for my rebuttals was actually sort of disproved, as Germany seems to be really good at renovating the building stock compared to e.g. Eastern Europe), which is also why this will probably be my last post in this thread.
> You are misinterpreting them. They don't literally say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years". They say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years without doing anything to increase their value". And this is certaily more or less accurate.
You seem really hung up on the topic of depreciation accounting (AfA) and don't seem to get my point. Depreciation is regulated and does not exist in a vacuum.
Depreciation is a legal fiction to model the reduction in value of assets in such a way that it is easy to calculate, but also close to the actual value that would be fetched on the market due to the depreciation.
You are essentially claiming several things with your argument: 1. depreciation is not correlated with actual value loss, and therefore 2. the economic lifetime model used to calculate depreciation does not correlate with actual use lifetime.
The first is correct: Renovation expenses can be used to raise the book value of the asset making them balance-neutral. The second is not and especially does not follow from the first for the reason that I told you, the lifetime model used in depreciation calculation is based on the observed lifetimes in reality. There is also feedback in the other direction as engineering decisions are taken based on the best practices in economic lifetimes, which is why I cited the relevant DIN norm for cost calculation for builders in my first post.
> That solution is what I would try in your situation.
Thanks for your advice. But I already tried that. And it's pretty funny that you literally try to explain the mentality of my grandma to me. But what do I know it's only my grandma.
Let's just let the topic rest, I do not really care about this discussion anymore.
The problem is that rooftop solar is not lowering those distribution costs in any substantial fashion.
Unless you mean that powerwalls are banned?
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.
Mounting structure is there, grid supply is there, no issues with weeds/grasses, generally up in the air etc.
Rooftops are unused space.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Rooftops are unused space, but the land use is generally a small part of the cost. Utility scale solar has real economies of scale compared to one-off small installations on someone's roof.
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.
Our council is currently promoting group buying discounts for solar and/or battery systems, and the state government had been running solar installation rebates/credits for several years.
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)
Also, the cheapest land I found was 4k/acre, still well above pfdietz’s estimate.
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.
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).
