Still, I would like to see some solutions articulated. Should we be promoting solar installation by non-profits? Direct government financed solar installation? Or abandoning rooftop and promoting community solar?
Ground mounted solar has the following benefits over rooftop solar:
- Much less permitting overhead per megawatt of capacity installed
- Safer and faster installation process (no risk of workers falling off rooftops, uniform rows of panels are easier to install)
- Lower hardware costs for inverters (since the units are larger)
- Easier to orient panel installation for optimum sunlight gathering, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year
- Easier to clean panels regularly, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year
- Possibility to use single axis sun tracking mounts for panels, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year
Rooftop solar has the following benefits over ground mounted solar:
- No additional consumption of land
- Slight reduction in transmission and distribution costs, since more electricity is generated directly at the site of consumption
These benefits are comparatively minuscule. A least-cost, fastest-progress plan for decarbonization would have the solar component heavily weighted toward large scale ground mounted projects. The additional money that would otherwise be spent on rooftop solar is better invested in all sorts of other things: wind farms, battery storage, insulation retrofits, heat pump replacements for gas heating...
How much electricity is lost in electricity transmission and distribution in the United States?
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.
Single high voltage transformers approach the 6-8% at full load... Not to mention the wire losses and other transformers in the system minimum 3-5). The number you quoted from the EIA is not accurate. See this Nameplate Z% (impedance aka losses) of an ABB 20MVA transformer: https://images.app.goo.gl/hXNTWAv1xnu83znQ7 It is higher as the transformers get larger.
Correction tho... 30-40% includes the losses from generation, not just T&D. And if you keep searching the EIA quoted that at 34%.
I didn't quote any numbers.
We'll end up in situations where people buy a property (personal or business) then the first year of ownership get hit with a "sorry, needs new solar system" type surprise bill. This is not uncommon for HVAC and sometimes plumbing issues, much more unusual for electric and gas utilities.
- No additional consumption of land
These benefits are comparatively minuscule
You can put all the ground mounted panels out in the countryside hundreds of miles away from the density, but high power transmission lines are also expensive and dangerous to maintain. Generating the power right where it's used completely eliminates a problem which has serious negative consequences like wildfires.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...
But now that solar seems to be a viable option it is unclear what the equilibrium point is. For coal, it didn't make sense to give everyone a generator. Even coal-powered fireplaces in homes turned out to be noncompetitive for heating, which is a bit of an unexpected outcome. So since rooftop solar is dangerous to install and comes with a maintenance burden as well as presumably increased risk to consumers, it might still turn out that the best approach is a big centralised solar farm with huge economies of scale. Keep maintaining and using a distribution grid.
Grids are expensive, so it could shake out either way. But I don't think the public knows what will happen yet.
I don't see it. Coal fireplaces are relying on the same idea as the ICE car, this fuel is so cheap to use that it won't matter if we use it inefficiently. But unlike cars, your house isn't going anywhere.
One thing people tend to get wrong about heating is that because of the laws of thermodynamics it seems as though any method must always be 100% efficient and thus it can't matter. But actually we care what gets heated. Fireplaces heat the air in the chimney well but you don't live there - you live in the rest of the house. As little as 20% of the thermal energy in the coal is converted into a warm living space, and that makes it pretty easy for electrical solutions to compete.
Something like a gas boiler heating water for radiators still can't deliver the same point of use efficiency (as resistive heating) because the burned gas is toxic, so we need to put that warm gas outside (otherwise what you've made is a death trap, not a warm home), yet we'd like to capture as much of the warmth as possible, the result is we're maybe 80% efficient. It's much easier to add radiators than chimneys, so the result is much better, but far from perfect.
Obviously you've got all the details, but if those details are what turned out to be true for coal then we as the public have no idea at all what the details are going to be for solar. Possibly even the insiders don't know yet. There is a pretty good chance here that centralised solar installations win the economic battle.
Have you tried not burning the coal? The coal was fine where it was, leave it there and save on extracting it, then burning it and then cleaning up the tremendous resulting mess.
You need a compatible inverter for it to work, and they're quite uncommon.
I read an HN comment earlier this week that noted that solar panels are so cheap that is is more economical to just install more panels than to pay for the expense and maintenance of moving parts. I.e. you can generate the same amount of extra energy that tracking would give you by adding more fixed untracked panels. And fixed panels with have no moving parts which makes maintenance super cheap.
A quick glance around at internet articles seems to confirm this take.
The use of single-axis/one-axis tracking in the U.S. utility PV market has grown significantly over the past decade. At the end of 2022, 73% of all U.S. utility-scale PV systems used single-axis tracking. And 86% of U.S. utility-scale PV systems installed in 2022 used single-axis tracking. This growth can be attributed to the reduced cost and increased reliability of trackers, making them the economic choice in a broader distribution of PV systems (e.g., less irradiant climates).
"National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Summer 2023 Solar Industry Update"
The generation being at the site of consumption has another big benefit: one of the largest roadblocks in the way of utility scale solar in Australia is that it's slow to get approval for the large grid connection you need to actually export that power. That time represents a cost that is sometimes larger than the cost of the actual grid connection itself.
Why not try to just NOT create incentives and let consumers choose?