Could you explain what you mean by "hyped in a marginalist way"?
That's not realistic. Of course, the limitations that solar has are very much solvable, and having solar is better than not having it. Solar is important, and it is our future.
But the solutions to solar's limitations seem to be in their infancy (new types of storage), hard to scale (battery storage), not really helpful (just build more coal and gas peakers!) or not considered at all. Which does not inspire confidence.
But that’s really more of a “80% of our power is solar” problem and the US isn’t even at 3%. The percentage of usage which could be handled by solar is usually far underestimated.
We don’t need to care about limitations of solar for a long long time.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Presumably you want a lot of hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear so you don't need a lot of batteries, and you have enough sources of power when the sun isn't shining.
Maybe I'm being un-imaginative - but is anyone envisioning a global energy grid so we could have solar energy from Australia and Sahara shipped to North America during our night - and back to Asia and Europe from the Southwest during our day??
^ This seems nonsense science fiction.
Depends on how much storage you have. There is very, very little right now so even 50% might be a stretch.
> Maybe I'm being un-imaginative - but is anyone envisioning a global energy grid so we could have solar energy from Australia and Sahara shipped to North America during our night - and back to Asia and Europe from the Southwest during our day??
I'd think you'd need a relatively inexpensive superconducting cable for that to make any sense. Running cables between continents has been a thing for over 150 years, but I'd think resistance losses would make it wildly impractical to power, say, Los Angeles with solar power collected in Australia.
Allow me to present to you the "Australia-Asia Power Link" [0], exporting solar power a distance of about 4,500km, which is still less than half of LA to Australia, but not insignificant.
What governs the practicality is often more complex than just power loss. Carbon credits, local taxation, and plain ol' bureaucracy can make it more profitable to export than to consume.
It's at the same point solar/wind were a few years ago when they were the cheapest form of energy but received a lot of criticism for making up a small % of total production.
Naturally that changed.
The cost for both is the big thing: even just assuming overnight electricity replacement, 12 hours * 2 TW * $100/kWh = $2.4 trillion; the 8 GW English Channel link cost $1.6/km[0][1], which a naive scaling up to 20 Mm and 2 TW would cost $8 trillion. Then the question is “which lasts longer, and which is harder to refurbish at end of life?”. (Numbers are just a guideline. On the one hand there is less demand at night and there will probably be wind and geothermal in the mix, on the other hand we want something that allows everyone to have an energy use currently only available to rich people and this doesn’t cover anything except mere electricity).
I have not been able to find the size of the global energy industry in dollars per year to compare this to, only an un-cited claim of “$5 trillion per year … subsidizing the fossil fuel industries”.
That said, at this scale I have to ask about the economics of making an orbital ring, transferring power kinetically in what is essentially a ballistic superconductor[2], and now you can put the PV in space on the ring without having to solve the political aspects of “can I convince everyone else I’ve not sneakily designed my power satellite to be used as a death ray, and can I be sure everyone else’s can’t all be told to collectively focus on one place even if I trust the owners’ intentions?” that usually follows any discussion of space-based solar.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Co...
[1] I’m ignoring converter stations because over 1 Mm they amortise to negligible
[2] i.e. purely classical and without the fun quantum magnetic effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_conduction
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-makes-big-leap-t...
South Australia does not have cheaper electricity bills. We also had a multi-day outage in 2016 which was partially due to wind generators shedding load. Large scale solar also periodically turn off rather than pay to add power to the grid due to too much installed capacity and no suitable storage.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/09/30/nsw-gives-a...
I rescind my statement from my higher level comment that "They have the lowest energy costs in Australia"; the data is incomplete, there are multiple factors at play between generators, transmission, and retail supplier cost variations, and it was too broad of a statement considering all of the factors involved (when I should've referred specifically to wholesale rates influenced by renewables).
[1] https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/news/media-releases/news/bang-...
[2] https://indaily.com.au/news/business/2021/05/10/rise-of-sa-r...
This is more of a failure of development and regulation of standards, which, I believe, have now been resolved. Said standards had already been developed in countries that had more experience in wind generation than Australia.
The "cause" was unprecedented wind speeds that brought down a few of the big "giraffes" that carry high voltage wires across the state and the interconnectors between states. See article below for example photo.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-28/sa-statewide-blackout...
A lot of good has actually come out of that event, none related to the politicking.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
Even now peak demand and peak solar production are fairly close daily.
We’re going to enter an energy economy where production isn’t just instantaneously controlled but supply is going to be a bit more dynamic and pricing is going to reflect that. There have already been demonstrated markets where this has been efficiently handled.
For a while there will be things like occasional negative pricing, but once users figure out how to take advantage of this prices normalize and usage will better match capacity patterns and new power installations will match new demand patterns.
Intuition on what you guess will be the case is a bad way to make arguments about infrastructure. Go look up actual data.
this is a lesson factorio can teach us. from[1]:
"A single solar panel outputs an average of 42 kW over a day and requires 0.84 accumulators to sustain a constant power output through the night.
It takes 23.8 solar panels to operate 1 MW of factory and charge 20 accumulators to sustain that 1 MW through the night."
the rules are contrived and simplistic, but the principles apply. the effectiveness of solar generation varies relative to net consumption rate and storage capacity. of course, some inefficiency may be desirable to avoid severe weather problems, but our imprecise climatalogical models dont positively affirm a sense of impending doom. hard to tell what the correct path is.
You are using numbers from a computer game wiki in a discussion about real world?
Numbers which are by the way off by 2 orders of magnitude. Don't have any nuance in them, don't account for any seasonal variance nor in fact for weather.
Quick ballpark numbers. Common solar panels are between 15 and 20% efficient. Numbers for the _surface_ of the earth (not the upper atmosphere) are quoted as about 1000W per square meter in a search. I assume that's a peak number.
Since I don't want to think about weather, calculus, or any other factors for a napkin estimate, can we agree that's 8 hours of useful output at 1KW of input power per hour? So over a day 1 meter of solar panel would generate between 1.2 and 1.6 KW / day? I'd also very crudely extend that to 75% of the daily output must exist as a storage buffer. (Gut feeling more than anything else.)
1.2KWd to 1.6KWd of daily generation per square meter.
0.9KW to 1.2KW storage; per square meter for a day.
I have trouble visualizing that though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-cycle_battery Suggests that the discharge should only be to 50% on a regular basis for the most economy of material use (and thus cost). Double the above estimates for the storage bank.
Searching for "deep cycle battery solar" I see many results for 12V 110AH batteries, just a tiny bit more than the 1200KW storage value I guestimated earlier. Around 200 dollars per battery, about 13 x 7 x 8.5 inches (rounded up). So a big honking consumer 'truck' / SUV battery sized deep cycle battery, but double that up for wear prevention.
Though I still prefer baseload generation capacity for industrial and 24/7 loads. Solar can be a good peaker for AC use and waking consumer stuff.
We're further along than you think.
After all, the entire fossil fuel reserves of planet Earth were generated over time by photosynthesis, i.e. the solar-powered capture of atmospheric carbon and its reduction to the hydrocarbon state from the carbon dioxide state.
The problem is the scale of the effort needed to replace current generation with solar generatioin. Practically, it would take decades and a vast amount of work. However, there are no technological barriers, and if the world had exhausted its fossil fuel reserves in say, 1970 then we'd already have much of the solar infrastructure in place.
As far as storage solutions, you can find dozens of strategies. My favorite is using solar energy to capture carbon for carbon fiber building materials, 'aerochemical' products (as opposed to petrochemical) for industrial needs (dyes, solvents, etc.) and of course RP1 jet/rocket production. Clearly such an approach will be needed for interplanetary travel as well (Mars seems to have enough CO2 and H2O to make this viable).
It's not surprising that people are so poorly informed, however, as the fossil fuel sector runs massive propaganda operations targeting childhood education onwards.
Just don't want to let it become a single point of failure. Earth's history is punctuated by periods of low sunlight at sea level.
If you have a large home or need to always have a fully charged car, spend $15k on a home battery.
We need to get out of this mindset that electric utilities will provide unlimited power at a fixed price. With some investment from individual homeowners we can reduce peak to average ratios for utilities and make it much cheaper and possible to use intermittent green energy sources like wind and solar.
That's a solution I hope that neither I nor my children live to see. It's a solution I hope never happens unless a new battery technology arrives that for a start eliminates our need to once again fuck over some very poor countries in order to get our hands on rare resources. Lithium battery tech is quite miraculous, but it's also not appropriate as the basis for the entire electrification of human civilization.
Also, lots of people will have neither cars nor garages.
It is already here. Google LFP batteries.
I can’t vouch for this of my own knowledge but as lithium is such a light element it is sensible that it would be easy to find and use.
Especially oil. Oil and coal and natural gas have horrifying consequences for local environments all the time, and nobody ever talks about that. From fly ash ponds to spills to destroyed drinking water. If there was anything remotely as bad as that, wouldn't any of these articles I have read pointed out the damage? Literally the worst lithium story is political, not environmental, in that indigenous people are not being given enough compensation for their land, or not given enough input.
Cobalt has stories of child labor at artisanal mines, but again that is political, not environmental damage, and the environmental damage is the same as from all the other parts that go into the grid, or a car, and they don't have the horrifying consequences of fossil fuel extraction.
If I'm wrong, and there is something I don't know,I will be forever grateful for a pointer to clear documentation of this environmental damage you speak of. But I have been asking this question for years, and searching for years, and nobody, literally nobody, has pointed me to anything concrete. Just vague assertions at best. Which is not what environmental damage looks like. Environmental damage is specific, horrifying, and all too often swept under the rug as long as its wealthy fossil fuel companies doing it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
No technical recolution needed, no rare elements needed, no invasions nedded, just plain salt, iron and copper. They are just bigger in size.
And for some reasons not really known so this whole discussion feels a bit off.
Too bad you'll be driving to the office on business days.
That just complicates distribution a little, but not a whole lot.
Unless you actually need the car during the day..
FWIW, the people I know with EVs have solar panels and a home battery.
Charging at work would be ideal - it would all basically happen 100% in solar hours. My work has solar on its roof itself, I'm sure more and more places will, so it all really makes sense. And that way I could basically run my house 100% off a battery, whereas charging an electric car from a home battery would probably mean I'd still have to buy a fair bit of power from the grid.
But yeah, the story basically is that it's all possible and not that hard.
I’d like to believe we’ll get to the point where we share self driving vehicles or own some that go on about their day producing profit.
The cars could also charge themselves in the process.
Once a vehicle (or a home) has been smoked in, you can never completely get the smell out.
It makes me nauseous to sit in that smell for any length of time.
We already pay spot price here in Norway.
It looks like 90%+ of electricity produced in Norway is hydro, with fossil fuels only around 2% [1]. Hydroelectric plants are very quick to respond to changes in demand.
From what I can see, it probably isn't a huge surprise bill risk to the consumer compared to places like, say, Texas.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway
I think most people don't realize that V2G tech is old (Chademo supported it, and older Leafs can already do it natively, and they're about a decade old), but it's expensive. You basically need a DC charger for every car that will be doing V2G. Look up how much a DC charger is, and you can get something like a dedicated Powerwall for the same price...
In any case, it's not hard to imagine that XX kWh onsite battery reserves will end up as a standard condo feature in the future same as hot water or a weight room.
You're not wrong, but also not right. We have renewables that run at night (wind, water, geo-thermal heat pumps), we have some storage solutions/"batteries" as well, such as pumping stations or water-based heat storage. And even peakers that burn fuel are not that bad for the environment if you only run them a limited time. Coal/gas peakers that only run when needed would not kill the environment if the main sources of energy production are renewable - a coal plant burning only some nights is still a lot better than one burning 24/7 - and peakers can be fueled by renewable sources as well, not just stuff you dig out of the ground, making them carbon neutral over the grow-burn circle.
The problem right now is that switching over to such a mixed energy production requires a lot of investment and construction, and we have a lot of infrastructure (especially housing) that cannot be easily retrofitted. E.g. right now, be it in the US, be it in Germany where I live, be it in other places, solar and wind deployment is severely hampered by the lack of transmission lines. This isn't a problem of high investment cost either, it's "locals" fighting tooth and nail against new transmission lines being build in the vicinity of where they live because "it ruins the view".
Currently we don't store large amounts of energy because it's cheaper not to, not because it's impossible to build the necessary infrastructure.
Hydro as storage, better grid interconnects, demand shaping (e.g. using smart storage heaters that turn on when electricity is cheap) can bring down the cost still further.
? Any interesting things to point me at on this topic?
---
This says 1954
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200904/physicshisto...
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Let me know if you have something else.
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...
>created the first solar cell by coating selenium with a thin layer of gold
from https://brewminate.com/a-brief-history-of-solar-panels-since...
Let's just pretend you would have any resemblance of a point there: Firstly, renewables are much cheaper than fossil or nuclear power - both in construction and operation. Secondly, the surging electricity prices, at least speaking for Germany here, are a result of the idiotic "EEG-Umlage".
Countries that have access to renewables are actually doing much better than others!
> Since most countries still rely on fossil fuels to meet all their power demands, the final price of electricity is often set by the price of coal or natural gas. If gas becomes more expensive, electricity bills inevitably go up, even if clean, cheaper sources also contribute to the total energy supply.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/28/why-europe-s-energy-pric...
I agree on nuclear, but let's talk coal. Your point is that coal is good?
The whole world is experiencing surges in electricity prices, not just the EU.
Even within the EU, countries like France, which gets up to 70% of its energy from nuclear power, has rising electricity prices.
Subsidizing wind and solar has nothing to do with this. Stop spreading lies.
Solar panels don't rely on fossil fuels either - perhaps you're confused by reporting that currently they're produced using a fair bit of energy from coal etc.? But that is reducing and improving all the time as grids get greener.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
ok, I’m not sure either
(Not a knock on solar panels, I’m just being pedantic)
By absorbing the energy to then use it - say to run aircon - it should be better than having the surroundings absorb it and then pump in more energy from outside to mitigate it.
Current estimates are around 1 year for southern Europe and 1.2 years for northern Europe: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
And then of course there's the massive cost of batteries and all the mining and recycling issues associated with that
And what about the amount of space they take up relative to other energy sources? What about the costs of cleaning up all the lead and cadmium that leak into the environment?
Also, please note that panels that contain cadmium are, I believe, around or less than 10% of solar panels produced.
There's no decreasing EROI on mining sand and bauxite.
The average lifespan of a panel is more like 60 years; 2-3 decades is just the design life. Of course some panels are defective.
Efficiency asymptotes to about 70% of initial efficiency.
There are a number of recycling solutions in place.
Making PV panels from PV panels takes less energy than making them from raw materials and not more.
There is no solar waste crisis.
There will be no solar waste crisis.
These panels aren't going to start dying out.
Batteries cost less than panels and have routinely been recycled for decades, because recycling them is lucrative.
The amount of space PV generation and batteries take up is irrelevantly tiny.
Modern solar panels and lithium-ion batteries contain no cadmium. PV panels do contain irrelevantly tiny amounts of metallic lead, which does not normally pose an environmental risk.
Cadmium telluride solar panels do contain cadmium, but they are no longer in wide use, because they cost too much to compete with polysilicon; because they are thin-film panels, the amount of cadmium they contain is irrelevantly tiny, and it is poorly soluble.
Discarded lead-acid batteries do not pose a significant environmental threat even if they fail to be recycled, because the lead they contain is not mobile.
I am at a loss as to how you managed to write a comment like this without accidentally slipping up and writing at least one statement that was correct.
This is the stupid marginal ism I am talking about.
Cranking out more solar panels is easy. Actually making the grids larger or have more storage requires the type of planning competence and cordination we suck at.
Solar panels are popular precisely because they don't require that planning competence and coordination. So if we go full solar wind, we will slam into a wall we are utterly unprepared for, despite, yes, getting better at solar and wind themselves with volume.
LiFePO4 packs already started trading below $100/kWh in 2020:
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/a-no-go-fantasy-writing-...
CATL is pushing sodium-ion batteries:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/catls-new-sodium-ion...
You don't even need a lot of storage to greatly increase maximum stable solar and wind share.
Exiting times ahead of us.
Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid, forcing poorer people who cannot afford their own rooftops to subsidize them. It is actually quite regressive- the denser the population center, the less electricity per person can be generated by solar. The electricity might be free, but the cost of maintaining the grid never goes away.
This isn't true, at least not in Colorado. I pay a number of fees for maintaining the grid and these aren't going away when I have my net meter installed later this week. (hopefully)
"their fair share." What exactly is that for something you don't use?
This is a bit like saying everyone who walks/bikes to work stops paying their fair share of gas taxes that maintain the roads their food arrives on.
I haven't seen people argue this point for people who don't own a car, but my state does have a special levy on electric and high efficiency vehicles to make up for lost gas tax revenues: https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/#highwayuse_fee.asp
Nope. Not in California- even if solar covers 100% of your usage, PG&E is collecting money from you. You don’t pay any energy production costs, but you’ll pay ‘your fair share’.
When you go with net metering you still pay a bit, but PG&E sources power at around 10 cents per kwh. The rest of the bill people receive is for infrastructure - around 2/3rds of their bill. They do this to incentivize people to use less electricity.
California's net metering is not sustainable for forever, and you are not paying for the infrastructure you're using. Which I don't have a problem with, it's just something that can't continue forever.
Anyway, in my country for historical reasons all of the electricity production was in one corner of the country. So if any of the generation moves away from there (and remembering that electricity always takes the shortest possible path [0] from producer to consumer) any new generation in any other part than the original producer lowers the demand on the grid.
[0] or to be more precise the lowest resistance
Isn't that paying for the grid?
Yes some people exist who don’t understand the scale of effort needed to get a grid ready to work with just solar and wind and little else. But humanity has done this before.