Important to note that Portugal's geography allows it to have a large fraction of base load met with an unvarying renewable - Hydro.
Not all nations will be able to reach these numbers with traditionally intermitent renewables like Solar/Wind.
Not all nations will be able to reach these numbers with traditionally intermitent renewables like Solar/Wind.
In theory? Yes. In practice? You have one whole hemisphere powering the other hemisphere, which makes transmission a brutal challenge.
FYI clouds exist as well.
> You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together)
It would cost orders of magnitude more in infra for the connection part that the power generation would (well, except for the solar panels you'd need to put on the Pacific Ocean, which is almost an hemisphere in itself, of course)
Agree the connection part would be tricky. But there vast majority of things need to be connected up anyway. We seem to have been fine with building gas pipelines that span huge chunks of the world.
That's a stupid metric, especially when you consider that the limit between the Pacific and Antarctic Ocean is completely arbitrary.
Just spin it and you'll see what I mean: https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/
It doesn't really matter if you have some daylight remaining in the Americas while the sun is rising in Asia, all the solar energy is going to over the Pacific and will be for hours before it fully reaches Asia.
> Agree the connection part would be tricky
It would be “tricky” in the same way space colonization would be “tricky”… Like not entirely theoretically impossible, but still very far from what's practical today.
We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources?
I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.
You have no idea of the amount of such cables that would be needed, nor than you have any idea of the difficulty of laying them. It is difficult in the same way sending rockets is difficult: we know how to do it and have been doing it routinely for decades, but that doesn't mean we could scale it to the point your project would need, very much like space colonization.
> We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources?
Yes, because it's “lengths times number of cables” that poses problems. The amount of power you'd need to be able to transfer is beyond imagination! I leave next to a nuclear plant that produces a mere 3.6GW of power, and there are multiple high tension power lines going from there, and only up to a few hundred kilometers away: in your fantasy you'd need A THOUSAND TIME more (over thousands of time more kilometers). If you managed to send a spacecraft that's a thousand time bigger than ISS, that's already space colonization for you already. Turns out scaling this up a thousand time is far from straightforward.
> I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.
You are underestimating it vastly. The world consumes 30 PWh of electricity a year. At 30% of capacity factor (which is the best you can hope for, realistically only achievable in low-latitude deserts without clouds), and 300MW/km², you'd need 40 000 km²: that's the size of Switzerland worth of solar farm, good luck putting that on pacific Islands…
Orders of magnitude matter, and you definitely lack the sense of scale for these things. What you're talking about is science-fiction material.
It’s a cool idea, and I’m pretty certain something like it is going to happen over time. Given we are seeing 10-100x (in gwh) of renewables be provisioned compared to any other type. So I guess welcome to science fiction!
Well, this comments explains a lot. Why are you even having this discussion if your engineering literacy is at this level?
> It’s a cool idea, and I’m pretty certain something like it is going to happen over time.
As unlikely as space colonization, but who know what can happen in the next centuries.
> Given we are seeing 10-100x (in gwh) of renewables be provisioned compared to any other type. So I guess welcome to science fiction!
Fortunately nobody is actually interested in trying to make your whole-earth storage-free solar electric grid. So actual engineers may actually get something done ;)
No it doesn't. I think you're missing what I mean. You need enough panels to generate ~82TWh/day. That roughly equates to 45 million panels of around 2m^2 so you'd roughly need around 136km^2. So they'd fit on Hawaii.
That's for the worlds entire consumption though, so even though you could fit the 45 million panels in one spot, in the middle of the pacific (so your previous point is moot) - you'd spread them around the world.
So despite no one apparently being interested in this crazy "whole-earth storage-free solar" We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally to date. So the numbers are not a crazy engineering challenge. It's actually just a distribution problem.
But sure, stick to attacking me rather than prosecuting the idea. I'm sure that's how all innovation happens right?
Thanks for confirming my previous point about engineering literacy, now at least I'm sure I haven't misjudged you before…
> So despite no one apparently being interested in this crazy "whole-earth storage-free solar" We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally to date. So the numbers are not a crazy engineering challenge. It's actually just a distribution problem.
Well, glad you've abdicated your initial idea[1] altogether. And since that was the idea that I've been criticizing in the whole thread, maybe this wasn't too much of a waste of time on my side then. Yes we're installing solar panels, but yes we're investing in storage as well and no we don't plan on having a world-wide grid to leverage the spinning property of earth to compensate for their intermittent nature.
This project look like they are installing a 4000km cable between Australia and Singapore. With storage as well. But I thought you said long distance cables don’t work? That’s what you said.
Maybe you should let them know about the cloudy days? You said solar doesn’t work.
They mine uranium in that same part of Australia… why didn’t they choose nuclear? You said nuclear was better choice… because of weight!
Not leveraging spinning, we are installing solar globally because the sun shines everywhere. Can you point to country not installing solar?
You didn’t refute my math on panels, is it wrong? I’m happy to learn. Or you just trolling? (Your error earlier was thinking you needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second or hour? Hard to tell, but it’s off by multiple magnitudes… you don’t need to do that, you have a whole year to produce it)
> by a 4,500 km (2,800 mi) 3 GW HVDC transmission line.
3 GW
Also it's still a project, a very ambitious one that is, which is projected for shipping in ten years, and whose budget has already doubled compared to what's initially projected and has already bankrupted once before getting saved, so it's a bit early to use that as a example of how straightforward such thing is… At this point, it is as “real” as fast neutron reactors…
> Maybe you should let them know about the cloudy days? You said solar doesn’t work.
Who said that? Not me. You know discussing energy technology isn't like supporting a sport team… If anything, I'd argue that the environmental impact of solar makes it the worst of the non-fossil energy source. But it works, it just doesn't work the way you think it works, you are off by orders of magnitude at every levels, that's the problem and that's why you end up with science-fiction “ideas” to save the world.
> Not leveraging spinning, we are installing solar globally because the sun shines everywhere.
Then you've abandoned your idiotic idea you started with and we're good, there's no much need to continue this discussion since you retracted the take I've been criticizing from the beginning.
> You didn’t refute my math on panels, is it wrong? I’m happy to learn. Or you just trolling? (Your error earlier was thinking you needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second… but you don’t need to do that, you have a whole year to produce it)
The fact that you think that I “needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second…” in my previous calculation is an example where your math is wrong. There's also the fact you don't realize that your “136km²” is off by multiples orders of magnitude (Hawaii is 16 THOUSAND of square kilometers, and even your project in Australia is going to be 150km² wide[1]), or that you don't even realize that your calculation ended up with “45 million panels” and one sentence after that you say with a straight face that “We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally”, without realizing that somehow it would mean that we'd have 30 times too many solar panels already… In addition to the math, there's also a lack of basic practical sense, like you can't multiply the size of the panel by their number to get the surface of a solar farm, and you cannot fit a solar farm on a mountainous island of the same surface unless you also plan to level the mountain altogether, and so on and so on.
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3091182/w...
136km is less than 16000km soo all the panels would fit there. That was my point????
The Australian one is spaced out because they have so much land they don’t care. So I still don’t get your point.
I think you are the one off by orders of magnitude, because you are confusing panel capacity with generation. Just to double check that, do you agree a single 400w panel generates conservatively 1800w/day ?
Yes we have installed enough panels to power the whole world many times over. But they aren’t connected… again that is my point.
There are HVDC cables in use all over the place. That tech is very much process out. Do you get what a 3GW line can do? It can deliver 72GWh in a day.
EDIT I’ve realised rather belatedly you are just a troll. Apologise for the overfeed.
It is, but it's not a language problem here… The problem is that all you write is nonsense!
For instance:
> The Australian one is spaced out because they have so much land they don’t care.
Like the I know the real estate in the Australian desert must be cheap, but why spend a HUNDRED TIME too much money on real estate just because it's cheap? You think the project financiers are completely dumb? Why can't you even imagine that your calculation is broken?
> Just to double check that, do you agree a single 400w panel generates conservatively 1800w/day ?
Come on. I don't know if I should laugh or sigh at this point.
> Yes we have installed enough panels to power the whole world many times over. But they aren’t connected… again that is my point.
Is there a sentience life behind this account or is it a markov chain language model? If there is, please take a big breath and think about what you just wrote. Seriously.
> Do you get what a 3GW line can do? It can deliver 72GWh in a day.
7.2⋅10¹⁰Wh/day, compared to the 8⋅10¹³Wh/day that the humanity consumes. That's 3 orders of magnitude off, that's how much you'd need to scale it up. Scale ISS by 3 orders of magnitude and you have a spaceship that's 5 times bigger than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, to keep the space colonization analogy. Scale the (provisional) budget required by this project by 3 orders of magnitude, and you get one year worth of US GDP. That's how non-trivial this is.
You should try and learn to manipulate orders of magnitudes, because that's a skill you're lacking and it really shows. The scales involved in such a discussion are so big you cannot rely on your intuitive sense of scale.
The earth's circumference is 40,000 km, or 24,000 miles. Even if hurricanes and monsoon seasons weren't a problem, you're still looking at obscene transmission losses to get energy to NYC in the middle of the night- say 55% or worse... and that's not even counting the fact that the lines can't hug the earth's surface, they need to run along the bottom of the ocean floors to avoid damage by storms, boats and currents.
I recall the register running the numbers on the idea several years back, and it wasn't pretty.
What if you produced the aluminium and steel with solar energy? Could an arc furnace get hot enough?
Concrete… I don’t know how much we are talking, you mean for foundations? There isn’t a way to make carbon neutral concrete?
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
So it's just off by a factor two if you compare with DC.
That's what intermittent means in the context of solar.
(And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x)
The land given it serves no other purpose is probably not expensive.
We are already doing projects like this [0]
For my country (France) IIRC it would require something like 30x more solar to cope with clouds + low light during winter. Take UK or northern Europe and you'd need 50x.
> And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x
What are you smoking? Also it would generate about 100 times more wastes (not talking about high activity waste of course, in which case it would be like a million time more waste)
I'm talking about the panels themselves after they reached their end of life.
> So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive
Nuclear power density is incredibly high: you build 1 concrete bunker and 3 supporting buildings and you have more than a gigawatt of power. For solar you need a square kilometer of solar panels to get 0.1GW.
Compare those two places next to where I live:
- the nuclear plant: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188
- the solar farm: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665
Roughly the same area. The solar farm has 55MW of power. The nuclear plant has 3.6GW, 65 times higher. And the nuclear plant's life will be 60 years at least, which means that over its lifetime the panels would need to be changed 3 times. And that's if there's no hail to damage them…
And this calculation only counts Power, if you did the same calculation for actual energy produced the difference would be around ten time worse.
I think counting a nuclear plant specifically without also counting the uranium mine required to support it is not completely honest. And also the storage facility for the waste should be counted as well. Uranium is typically huge open pit mines.
During a thunderstorm this spring, the solar farm I'm talking about above suffered significant damage from hailstones, losing around 10% of the panels (the farm had only opened in summer 22). That's one anecdotal example.
> I think counting a nuclear plant specifically without also counting the uranium mine required to support it is not completely honest.
You're vastly underestimating the energy density of Uranium: France, which produces close to 80% of its energy with nuclear imports less than 10 000T of Uranium each year. That's one kilo for 44 MWh of nuclear energy. (And most of it, the U238 part, isn't actually being used, but instead stored until the advent of breeder reactors). A solar panel weights a few dozens of kilograms per MWh/year (let say 20kg/Mwh/year, conservatively, even though from a quick search it's likely more) so you'd need to have your solar panel for 44x20 = 880 years for the mass of the solar panel to be of the same order of magnitude as the same mass of Uranium.
> And also the storage facility for the waste should be counted as well.
As mentioned earlier, there will be hundreds of time more waste from Solar panels than from nuclear. Solar panel's waste are actually toxic wastes[1], full of heavy metals, BTW. (And unlike nuclear radioactive wastes, heavy metals have an infinite half-life: they don't live from hundred of years, they remain toxic forever)
> Uranium is typically huge open pit mines.
Only 12% of Uranium mining actually happen in open pits mines[2]. Also, do you think Silicon grows in trees?
France alone extracts 12 times more silicon that what we import of Uranium.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Mining_techniqu...
Silicon is in sand… which is also a good place to put solar panels.
Are you really weighing uranium vs solar panels? What kind of measure is that?
How much does a nuclear plant weigh? What about the water pumped into a plant? What does that weigh? Do you need to weigh the people required to run a plant to get your kg/Mwh measure? XD
Oh yeah let's talk about the soviet union again and do if it was a nuclear problem … By that metrics hydro power is absolutely terrible as well, given that we've had two major dam incidents (including one in… Ukraine) this years causing much more death than Tchornobyl ever did… Also should you count all nuclear incidents that resulted in reactor being damaged, you'd still be far lower than 10% of installed power being destroyed.
> Silicon is in sand…
Because open pit sand mining causes no issue somehow? Uranium is also in sand (at least in Kazakhstan, #1 producer) so what?
> Are you really weighing uranium vs solar panels? What kind of measure is that?
Measuring environmental impact of both energy production mean. Which is the opposite of the “solar good for the planet/ nuclear bad” irrational argument that you're having.
> How much does a nuclear plant weigh?
Much less than the equivalent solar farm, that's been my point from the beginning.
> What about the water pumped into a plant?
That water goes in and out, is that all you have as an argument left? Do you count the air going through wind turbines as a waste when evaluating wind power as well or the double standard only applies to nuclear for some reason?
> Do you need to weigh the people required to run a plant to get your kg/Mwh measure?
Ohoh, very clever >_<
So nuclear plants waste heaps of water. By your measure.