Satellite powered estimation of global solar potential
research.google
research.google
In the article they show areas where their approach can generate DSM although this is just the potential areas and not the areas where data is already available. :(
Thos exact abbreviation is so overloaded that it doesn't hurt to list the words once.
Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it? More complicated and expensive to permit and install, less efficient operation, difficult to repair, difficult to insure, difficult to upgrade, inefficient to integrate into grid, etc.
But yes, distributed solar will not be the general solution to decarbonizing our energy systems as a whole. Does serve a meaningful role though and there is no reason to not do both.
One such example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/08/...
Perfect is the enemy of good
Either you're assuming residential battery storage systems replacing the grid, or your ignoring the connecting rooftop solar to the grid requires permits and planning (the grid may not be able to handle it).
More durable for individuals in the face of large scale failures. You're paying for something real there.
You also just have issues like the low chance of having clear skies after a hurricane or a bushfire.
For disaster situation power, a diesel generator is still the cheapest and most reliable option.
Also, diesel and gas were pretty much inaccessible for the first 5 days of the disaster, so unless you have a stockpile that's been treated for longevity, you might not even be able to run your whole home generator for long.
Is this a thing IRL? Every system I've looked at stops feeding the grid as soon as the grid goes down
But that's more a policy decision than a technical restriction. We could change it so power can flow on both sides of a fault instead of only the "upstream" grid side.
a) government mandates that turn over existing grid infrastructure to such a project, because the existing grid infrastructure is almost all privately owned
OR
b) building new infrastructure to create an isolatable local grid
Neither of these seem particularly likely to me.
This is so those F150s are not backfeeding the wires while a repair crew is trying to fix it.
Ergo, if the local grid is "taken out", those F150s cannot be "on the local grid".
The lightning extended range has a 135 kwh battery and can backfeed 90A@240V. That's a heck of a lot of power.
Yes, and sort of.
Inverters will prevent power flowing to the grid if the grid is off. However most inverters will continue to supply power into the house while the grid is off.
There are various factors in play here, and you need to do proper homework, but certainly a fraction of the house can be powered, if not all of it.
I'm not sure if this is "special" inverter or not. Every one I researched had the same functionality.
The shelf life of diesel is about a year; the shelf life of propane is effectively unlimited.
Home solar is a big win, and if nothing else allows capital to be sourced from a million home owners.
Centralized solar is a big win, generating grid power Erich is obviously important.
It's not a question of either, it's a question of both.
https://energyandpolicy.org/fossil-fuel-funding-opposition-r...
Maybe when battery prices come down even more. But the cost of grid-level storage are also falling, and wind pretty much only works at grid scale. Grids have to change but won't become obsolete anytime soon.
Smarter grids are an even better solution; batteries backing local high-variance demand combined with rapidly negotiated requests for transmission power to meet expected future demand (and then stored in the batteries) reduces (electrical) inefficiency to a minimum.
(Although, if you factor out all the extra driving needed for the suburban life, it would likely still come out negative compared to a proper city.)
Six. The most heat escapes through the roof, but thermal loss through the floor is generally about 10-15% of the total.
Same goes for the slab/foundations (which can also have substantial thermal transfer in many contexts).
As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar (and another ~10% was utility-scale solar).
Rooftop solar works just fine if utilities don’t actively try and obstruct its use.
> As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar
Not 'As of lunchtime' but 'At precisely lunch time'. An hour later it wasn't 50% anymore, and it won't be 50% except at noon for a long time yet. As of the moment I am posting this, solar is 0% and coal is 80%. If Australia cares about global warming they should build nuclear plants and stop generating 70% of their overall power from coal.
It's still remarkable how much solar is growing and I hope it's 100% 24/7 soon!
If I'd looked the example when South Australia's interconnector with the rest of the NEM went out, they had periods with the instantaneous penetration of rooftop solar was over 90%. AEMO, the body that manages the Australian electricity grid, are aiming to be able to support a 100% instantaneous renewable mix on the NEM within the next year or two.
As for Australia's overall electricity mix, that is rapidly changing (and the numbers get a bit distorted by the amount of self-consumption of rooftop solar). We're at 40% renewables overall now, and while it may not hit the government's 82% target by 2030 we will almost certainly reach 70% or so by 2030 and I'd think 90% by 2035 is very doable. The last 10% is harder, but there are enough options (gas with CCS, green hydrogen, biofuels, long-term energy storage of other kinds) that I reckon we can get there. We are in the fortunate position of not having solar completely go away for months in the winter.
As for nuclear, it's never, ever going to happen in Australia (despite the claims of the conservative side of Australian politics). Even if Australia could build nuclear power as efficiently as South Korea - an extremely big ask, given we have the same challenges at building large infrastructure as the rest of the English-speaking world - it still doesn't make economic sense.
It really depends on what you mean by 'worst'. In terms of land-usage it's the best. In terms of speed-of-deployment it's the best. In terms of distributing capital spend its the best.
In terms of capital return, that will vary from one house to the next because it depends on location, energy consumed (and when), elec prices in your region, grid stability, and so on.
The data shows that you are correct. Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
As the statista.com report says:
>...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc. don't.)
It generates power at roughly the cost of nuclear. It's distributed and resilient. It works around sluggish government and/or corporate monopolies. It reduces transmission requirements. It enables and encourages electrification and time-shifting of load. Adding it at build time can be cheaper than tiling.
It’s generally a good thing and we'll see even more if it as the tech progresses and gets cheaper.
Yes and:
With the rise of "virtual power plants" (VPPs), "all the above" (PV, batteries, EVs, water heaters, HVAC, residential geothermal) will be stitched together to create decentralized, more resilient power grids, capable of peer-to-peer power sharing.
Analogy:
Remember the term 90s "convergence" (turrible term)? Describing how the computer (digitization) was becoming the everything tool? VPPs (turrible term) is just the electification of "all the things", unifying all energy (heat, electricity) stuff (source, sink, storage).
It's a good way to anticipate this interation of "convergence". eg VPPs' analog to "traffic shaping" is "load shaping". eg Just like internet is a network of networks, the "intergrid" will be a network of grids. Etc.
It's really easy to see the rough outlines (age of renewable energy) once a person learns of the 100s (1000s?) of puzzle peices currently being assembled. Just reflect on the internet and superimpose those notions onto energy.
Thanks for listening.
I can actually get balcony solar here in Germany for about 240 euros. Here's how that works:
- I buy a kit on Amazon. I found several nice ones. This one is rated for 850w and includes cables, inverters and other bits and bobs needed.
- I zip tie the panels to my balcony
- And I plug in the equipment and connect it to a wall socket
The idea is that this would offload some of the power used by e.g. my fridge. Not the same as a rooftop setup obviously and in my case quite pointless since I don't have a lot of sun on my balcony.
But I might actually qualify for a rebate if I do this and get all or most my money back. The government is sponsoring this and landlords can't stop you from doing this. Nor do you need their permission, a permit, or special insurance.
The point is that this stuff is cheap, easy, and pretty much plug and play. Roofs aren't a whole lot more complicated than this from a technical point of view. You need more panels and more expensive equipment and you probably need some professional electricians and installers to do the work.
The rest is just nonsense that relates more to your local government and legislation than anything being inherently expensive or difficult. I'd suggest reminding your local politicians of their responsibilities during the next elections and maybe voting for the ones that aren't being jerks on this front.
Otherwise, solar panels are pretty reliable and generally covered by long warranties. Repairing them is mostly not a thing, somebody would come and simply replace them. I doubt that a lot of solar panel companies and installers are suffering a lot under the enormous burden of this happening all the time for the simple reason that it this isn't a thing.
The reason that's affordable there and requires subsidies in wealthier nations is all the nonsense the nanny states we live in come up with to over complicate things. You need certified this and that. Only people in possession of a special license can plug component A into component B, or strip some wires. And then there is the local grid monopoly that throws up all sorts of obstacles.
There's a way around this. Just buy some panels and batteries on amazon and wire up your shed, boat, cabin in the woods, etc. It's all plug and play. You don't need any permits, special skills, etc. And you end up with a system that can provide a couple of KW of power. Not that hard. There's nothing special about a rooftop. You might need a ladder to get there and you might want to take some safety precautions to avoid dropping off.
If it can remove the need for a grid-tie, then rooftop solar can be significantly cheaper and more efficient. Can be, but isn't yet, because enough overcapacity and storage to eliminate the need for a grid tie is still too expensive.
Rooftop is competitive with the meter price, but unless you can cut the cord entirely, connection fees and rates will just keep increasing proportionally
Once you do the math in a Northern country (sans subsidies) it's not as compelling as you might think.
I live near the 33rd parallel South. Since installing solar my annual grid requirements are around 30% of before solar [1] ‐ even as my actual consumption has risen [2].
As far as "Northern" goes countries in my latitude north (or better) include India, Mexica, all of Africa, most of China, and so on. So for most people living in the north it is compelling [4].
[1] a very large fraction of my grid usage is really cold, wet conditions for 6 weeks in winter. A combination of low generation and high usage for heating.
[2] cooling in summer is free, so we run the aircon a lot more. Plus things like slow-cooking etc are free as well.
[4] my return on investment (grid cost of generated electricity over capital invested) is 16.7%. Projected lifespan is 10 years for battery and inverter, 25 years on panels, 50 years on wiring.
People wrongly assume that you can put Europe and the US in the same basket (because temperature-wise climate is comparable), but half of Europe is further north than Montreal, and almost all of it is beyond Philadelphia, so no you can't really say “Europe and most of the US”.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/16/tackling-soft-costs-a...
In Minnesota the "deal" for solar if you cannot DIY / off-grid is just meh.
They do not allow use of battery backups or cutover, they cut out when the power goes out, and they "credit" you to reduce your overall bill. You can make money if you produce more power in sunny warm times than you use year around (at least while you are the only one!), but the dream of energy independence at a local scale just isn't there yet.
What I want is something that offsets my grid use (potentially to zero but not negative), so that I can use grid or solar to charge my EV and a whole-home battery bank with three days reserve. I don't care about becoming part of the overall grid solution, but in city limits, it appears I must, and that necessitates extra equipment and rules out my backup use case.
And yet, I get constant calls and fliers about it - all "soft costs" - no matter how much I say no.
Then, once the top places are addressed, you can move onto the second tier of locations, then the third, etc...
This could be helpful if you're in gov't and have some control over a pilot neighborhood project. Or a developer that wants to include solar on some homes/businesses and wants to know where it makes the most sense.
You're right that this probably isn't too much better than qualitative reasoning about how sunny certain places are, but this is quantitative, so you can have a little more confidence in your qualitative assessment.
Aside from that grid operators buy power from producers. They don't plan future capacity more than 72 hours in advance. If you're a producer with expensive power you won't sell much. If you're a producer with cheap power you will sell a lot. It's already a functioning market. Solar is a very small part of it.
The cost of panels has fallen a lot, but the cost of mounting hardware and installation is still pretty high in the US.
In Germany we already have large distance energy transfer problems.
And PV is so cheap now + battery, you get independence / real freedom out of the box.
If you have valuable space on the ground and want to remove the utilization of it, sure but I prefer it on the roof were it doesn't do that.
But yes next to autobahns or other smart locations yes put it on the ground.
But when I invest in myself I will not sponsor pv somewhere else
$20k upfront cost.
$4k in savings over 20 years.
That's an implied rate of return of 0.9% annually.
No thanks.
So no. 20kw is not the answer. I showed my setup: 3.5kw + big battery. Pays the bill approx 60 70% of the daily usage. Investment payback : 5years.
They're a terrible deal for those companies investors though.
Presumably at some point they go bankrupt and sell your roof at auction??? weird setup
A lot of the time such companies pray on people on stupid plans (or those paying thru the nose for "exclusively renewable") power.
(9 USD / kWh sounds terrifying. Not only an electric kettle begins to cost you; probably playing computer games at high quality / resolution comes with a noticeable price tag in electricity that the GPU would eat.)
1. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
It’s ignoring inflation on those calculations, acting like your electric bill will be the same in 20 years. It’s also ignoring residual value in the system after 20 years they typically last 25-30, and you don’t pay taxes on savings.
There install estimates where also really high for my area, but I don’t know if that’s a general issue.
In two decades, we could see advancements like mobile generators offering free power, ultra-affordable battery packs delivered to homes to meet energy needs, or even the widespread adoption of low-cost fusion energy.
The key takeaway is that predicting the future cost of electricity is as challenging as it was to predict today’s solar energy costs—now far lower than anyone expected.
Beyond that none of their prices or timelines are accurate, even ignoring the issues with inflation.
> mobile generators offering free power
With solar technology, powering a home with a mobile generator is possible. Yes, the generator and batteries will have associated costs, but the long-term benefits make it worthwhile. This assumes uninterrupted access to sunlight over the next 20 years without new restrictions.
Key Considerations:
Energy Need: The average home uses 30 kWh/day, requiring 6 kW/hour over 5 peak sunlight hours.
Multijunction Panels: Lab efficiencies are already at 47% (2023), and with 20 years of progress, 60% efficiency is probable.
Efficiency Impact: At 60% efficiency, panels generate 600 W/m², requiring 10 m² (e.g., 2 m × 5 m) to meet energy needs. This size fits on most home roofs or could be mounted on a pole or hung through an apartment window.
System Components:
High-efficiency solar panels.
30 kWh battery storage for nighttime or cloudy days. An inverter to convert solar DC power to home AC power. Outcome:
A mobile solar generator with advanced panels and efficient storage provides a sustainable and portable solution for powering homes.
So you’re assuming the big competition for home solar is… home solar but ignoring what makes home solar expensive (permits, electricians, tariffs etc panels are already shockingly cheap). Installing solar in 15 years also means you’ve lost 15 years of cheap solar power and are buying panels after inflation, waiting just hasn’t seen instillation costs drop for a while.
But you’re also wildly mistaken about the rest, it’s not actually 47% or now 47.1% efficient when placed outside. Panels get more efficient as extreme levels of light so people going after records create wildly irrelevant numbers as a dick measuring contest.
Further the day someone invents 60% efficient panels isn’t the day we put those suckers into mass production we hit 40% in 2006, but they are nowhere near commercially viable for home installations. We might see widespread use of 60% efficient panels long after we’re dead, but that’s not exactly relevant for these calculations.
Many here are relying on inductive reasoning, arguing that since this hasn't happened historically, it can't happen in the future. I'm presenting a counterpoint: with current technology and 20 years of advancement, this outcome is entirely possible.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that mobile generators and solar panels would be free. Rather, the energy they generate could become effectively free. The current challenge is that centralized grids are often necessary because we can't store enough solar energy in batteries. However, with advancements in battery technology over the next 20 years, it could become possible to go completely grid-less. If that happens, we could see significantly lower energy prices—something we should remain as open to as the possibility of higher prices, all on an inflation-adjusted basis.
Rather than competition what you’re describing is a way to increase the value of installing solar today.
> adjusted for inflation
I brought up inflation because buying a hedge that keeps up with inflation and selling it in the future results in paying taxes on that nominal increase in value but saving money doesn’t have that penalty. You also lose out on the lost productivity from a solar while waiting for prices to drop so it takes a lot more than just moderate inflation adjusted savings to make waiting advantageous.
We know for certain that pricing is going to get really bad in CA due to a 2022 law that permits PG&E and other utilities to charge large connection fees based on your income (will probably hit in 2026).
I would gladly be the counterparty to any wager that 20 years from now electricity is going to be cheaper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency#/media...
Plus, are you counting in inflation of electricity prices in those 20 years? I'm sure electricity isn't going to get cheaper
My electrical experiences are regional to my area in the NorthEast US where long duration events have caused many thousands of US dollars in lost food, tens of thousands of dollars in losses from flooded basements, and when temperatures in Winter often drop below freezing and the power goes out pipes begin to freeze causing even more damage structure wide. In time we will see insurance companies reducing rates for those with local energy storage as the corporate insurance machine catches up to understand the benefits of having such power storage locally. I laugh when people make this exact financial reasoning argument because so few people look at the big picture and fail to comprehend the impacts to their life when that switch on the wall leaves one in the dark. Then again I have designed and architected many successful software systems for high availability and my foundational starting point with any system is always energy. Most of those in society assume that switch will always turn on that light and when it does not then those impacted begin to realize what a "centralized grid" truly means.
Decentralizing the grid is already happening as CA very recently announced any new residences built as of 2026 and beyond must be constructed with PV and storage. Individuals can act in ignorance on the energy problems for now however in time everyone will be forced to participate as the issues continue to compound.
Proactive versus reactive, because by the time it matters it will already be too late.
Global Solar Power Potential Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40303570 - May 2024
Your energy bill is about 1/4 or 1/3rd distribution. As you take less power from the grid because of the solar on your roof, that proportion grows larger and larger.
At the same time, the power company makes less money off of you, because you are using less power. Therefore, they have less money to invest in distribution, which means they must increase distribution fees further to stay a going concern. This is to say nothing of the ballooning costs of distribution in general (nimbyism, permitting fees, can't build jack shit in this country for no good reason etc.).
Therefore: in the hypothetical where everyone has solar rooftops, we all effectively pay the grid operator only for dirty/offpeak power. This makes the grid operators look bad to everyone (they're using dirty power, aren't we trying to fight climate change!? Why is my electricity bill astronomical, even though I only use a tiny bit of power!?) and puts them in an impossible situation -- they're stuck between capped profits, creating expensive clean power at off-peak hours, and limited cash in general, since their expensive power plants are dormant half the time. Yet they still must deliver power to their customers, 24/7.
People have to have 24/7 electricity, even though the solar on their house does not cover them 24/7. It's illegal to sell a house that is not connected to the grid in most areas. Therefore, consumers must pay for the option of using electricity in off-peak hours. Everyone will be upset. The grid operator, who is constantly thrashed by politicians who insist on their using clean power, their customers who are enraged at them for the seemingly exorbitant electric bills (which are mostly distribution).
The upside is that the grid is more resilient, but as others have mentioned, only if significant investments in local distribution are made (i.e. the ability to very dynamically/granularly pump power back up, from house to grid). Which is a big capital investment that the grid operators will not be able to afford.
All this is downstream of the fact that it is hugely inefficient to put a ton of tiny solar panels all over the place, where they cannot be installed, cleaned, maintained, replaced cheaply. It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network.
Everyone will pay for that resilience, in their electric bill, one way or another.
Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?
What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.
I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?
You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
Sure. But opposition to those battery energy storage systems (BESS) is intense and growing.
Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.
Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.
Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.
Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.
If that were true people wouldn't be buying solar panels for their homes because grid electricity would be "way less expensive" and it wouldn't be worth it. Which means either it isn't true, or the grid companies are too busy profiteering and it's not "putting the grid operators in an impossible position where everyone unfairly hates them" it's "grid operators putting themselves into an impossible position where everyone deservedly hates them".
People who don't have solar panels pay for electricity at 11:00AM. That's lucrative for the grid operator between 11:00-3:00 only -- when the duck curve is low. When demand peaks at 5-6pm, the grid operator pays boatloads of money to import power from elsewhere, burn expensive fossil fuels to service the demand.
Crucially, the grid operator is limited on pricing: they cannot "gouge" consumers at 5pm -- they must keep prices below a cap. Utility pricing is extremely regulated, it's set essentially by the state.
What you're doing when you set up solar panels on your home is actually freeloading. Your electric bill is less than it should be: you take power (at an artificially low rate) when it's super expensive, and don't take it when it's super cheap. This is very very bad business for the grid operator. They're also mandated by law (!) to keep your house hooked up to the grid and run distribution lines all over the place. Just in case you want to plug your car or run your AC at 5pm. Try getting a permit to build a new transmission line anywhere and see whether that's good business. If you have solar panels on your house, you are being subsidized by them -- not the other way round!
Timing is everything here. The United states has on the order of minutes of energy storage across the electric grid.
All I have are nits to pick:
> 10.7k TWh globally
This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".
Also, and this is not a criticism of Google, the IEA link on that text looks suspiciously like the IEA is still forecasting linear deployment of PV between 2025 and 2035, despite at least a decade of people pointing at it being historically exponential and asking why they don't assume the exponent will continue — I'm expecting about double their number for PV by 2035, if trends continue.
Agree I hate this, but at the same time I don't know if I would have groked it correctly on first read if it had listed "10.7Pwh globally". We simply aren't exposed to numbers at that scale on a regular basis.
Not sure what the correct solution is here.
I guess that if you want to stick to TWh you can use
- 10700
- 10,700
- 10.7×10³
- 1.07×10⁴
- 10.7e3
- 1.07e4
- 29E8₁₆
Scales to everything, you do not need to know any mapping, and directly supports mathematical manipulation.
We should also do the same for large number words in general. No thousand, million, billion, etc. E3, E6, E9, etc. Now you can count and represent any meaningful number without needing to memorize a dictionary of words and they would precisely match the unit scale “words”.
428.6 kg relativistic mass-energy equivalent: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10.7PWh%2F%28c%5E2%29
But then, I am a silly person.
The problem is we don't live in a society powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactions, or black evaporation so it's not really useful - unlike say, the electron-volt which at least serves physicists nicely.
This would be a devastating own if a single Joule wasn't exactly equal to a Watt-second.
Put a different way: the total annual harvestable solar yield is within an order of magnitude of the energy we've caused to accumulate inside the atmospheric boundary. Think about that, for a second or two.
So crazy and true. Sources:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-forecasters-gap
7 years ago (!): https://xwpxpfefwalgifkr.quora.com/A-modest-proposal-to-the-...
If you assume it’s ~26% annual growth now, and drops by 2% per year so 24% next year then in 10 years you’ll see 4.25x last years installs and the cumulative initiation over the next decade is 2.8x a linear estimate.
IMO that’s probably a reasonable ballpark, though capacity factors are an open question as they could fall dramatically or maintain fairly steady depending on how much grid storage shows up.
SI is such a senseless system. Unit prefixes were not a good idea. Did you move the decimal point or just switch to "Mm?"
Certain things are measured in certain units, prefix included.
This would be like writing interstellar distances in km instead of light years or parsecs.
For the uninitiated, what's confusing about this? It seems to communicate the intended meaning accurately. Is there some ambiguity here I missed?
Sometimes it's useful to distinguish these, though. And after many do have the inexplicable "MM" suffix (ie s thousand-thousand) to suffer through which seems much worse.
When every roof and every solar panel is angled the same way, a sudden cloud (or a sudden lack of clouds) can cause huge fluctuations in power output. Diversity is protective.
And I'm obviously not saying that you should point panels north either. I'm disputing the parent commenter's claim that it would be beneficial to have all panels aimed directly due south. Because that way you get one strong peak at noon, which is the time of day when solar energy is most abundant but also least used.
A battery helps negate this issue but not entirely.
You're better off just adding however many extra fixed panels you need to make up for the lack of tracking (and its normally not very many).
So it’s not universally applicable - but it is absolutely true that it will increase solar output!
C'mon ... people figured this out in 70s ... and centuries before that in various parts of the world.
You put a shade above the window the excludes direct summer sun, but allows direct winter sun to enter the window. The angle and extent of the shade depends on where you are in the world.
On my old adobe in New Mexico, a roof at about 30 degrees with about an 18" overhang prevents all direct summer sun from entering our south facing windows, but provides 6-10F of additional ambient temperature during the winter from direct sunlight.
But what I stated is plainly true, and many people simply don’t want exterior shades (or just don’t think about it).
The point I was trying to make was just that there are thermal implications to the orientation, and you should think those through (using thermal simulations can help detect these issues) and come up with appropriate strategies (thermal simulations can help validate them). Maybe you don’t want shades, but you would be okay with emissivity coatings for your windows. Or maybe you just want to position windows on both sides of the home with continuous air volumes connecting them to promote natural ventilation. Maybe you can take advantage of thermal mass. The list goes on…
Electricity use is more common in the evening, so west facing panels do really well because they offset demand.
We have an East/West split on our panels and they're excellent for providing instantly useful electricity as opposed to stored electricity.
Biggest blockers for solar are (total conjecture) : 1- Inertia - flat out. 2- Long-term ROI is not totally clear - How long till I need to replace, roof damage, ability to hold up in storm. 3- Cost - You need to invest sig $ to see your electric bill decrease meaningfully. Gov subsidies are nowhere near where they should be.
I am praying for a major breakthrough in cell efficiency to make it a no brainer. Does anyone have any insight on that?
Gov subsidies are the government giving the tax money of poor people who cannot afford houses to rich people who have houses. Highly regressive. Your PV system should stand on its own merits without holding out your hand to other taxpayers to fund you.
Carl is a mensch.
He's also the brilliance behind https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-airlines-contrails-clim...
Proactive versus reactive : The data doesn't lie, people do.
Stay Healthy!
I hope you at least offered to help...
Given the distance from my home to others some people I cannot help because the voltage drop would be to great over the needed corded run. Those within proximity to me that would not suffer voltage drop and undue strain on my own storage system I would gladly help but my own storage is finite and if I help just one person then...
My proactive planning and execution for my decentralized energy generation and storage system was done for my own families quality of life continuity based on my life's experiences. Everyone's life experiences are different and therefore your mileage will vary.
Last time we flooded, they came over and helped us bail water. When power was out, we helped them power their fridge with a spare generator. We generally help each other when we can, and enjoy doing so.
Nobody enjoys relaxing while watching others stress out and panic.
- GCP vs AWS
- Gemini vs ChatGPT
etc