Countries are building lots of solar and wind. However, these techs only operate/run during the daytime or when the wind is blowing... which is not 100% of the time.
If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?
I keep earing that, but it is not totally clear for me. It seems the start and the stop of a nuclear plant takes a day if we want to be safe and efficient. A fast shutdown in a couple of seconds may cause difficulties to restart afterward. Maybe we could study procedures for safe quick start/stop even if the efficiency is not perfect.
If you had enough nuclear capacity to cover for when wind/solar aren’t outputting anything, then you don’t need wind/solar. You’d just use your nuke plant 100%.
If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
Nothing, it's a false premise. In reality, what will happen is that we'll be using the more expensive FF power when we can't get cheap renewable power, and supply will adjust to that demand. Why would FF plants go "out of business" when there's a need they could meet?
Negative prices (i.e. excess of energy), and really high ones (lack of it) rarely happen. When they do, there is ancillary services that take over (which there is plenty in Europe).
Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
Gas, oil, coal plants fill in when solar and wind don't work. That - along with nuclear phase-out - is why there's lots of several new coal plants being built in Germany, for instance.
There is just one coal power plant under construction Dateln 4. [1]
This is not going well, with boiler and legal issues meaning a plant which was supposed to open in 2013 is to open 7 years later in 2020. Making it not exactly a great poster child for how to build a coal power plant. Being in construction for 13 years is not cheap and fast.
Modern coal plants have to be complicated in order to be efficient, and that means they take a long time to build and have to be big. Meanwhile, wind and solar can be built much smaller and quicker, with the biggest bottleneck being building transmission lines (if needed.)
Kind of funny that "big coal" is now suffering from a problem that nuclear has struggled with for a long time.
That was my point, a dim list - although the first in the list in "under construction - in undefined state", so it's not only planned. I looked for other lists but couldn't find one. Yes, I can't see a lot of coal power plants build in Germany.
My guess is that energy will be so cheap, we produce much much more than we consume in the future. There will be an abundance of energy some decades down.
Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering.
I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power.
What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
>Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
Chem engineer here, battery technology doesnt seem to be a guarantee to improve.
Batteries are limited by the physics of our universe. The chemistry between two chemicals will not change, and it feels like we have exhausted every option.
This is a non trivial problem and I am unsure if I expect a solution.
In 2 decades there will be hundreds of millions of electric cars in the world which currently do not exist. This is a huge increase in battery power even with battery technology not changing in the next 2 decades.
I'm curious of what your opinion of hydrogen is, I know that it's still very expensive because of energy lost during the conversions. Do you think it has a viable future when it comes to energy storage?
I expect minimal (or even zero) energy density improvements.
However, I do expect cost improvements. Even if the cost to make a battery is constant when measured in joules, PV is getting cheaper and can supply more joules for less money.
Not at all. Even in cars, further density improvements are not needed, as the limitation to general adoption is cost rather than range or performance. In restrospect I ought to have mentioned that in my previous comment…
Density + charging speed are definitely important but I do agree that cost is without a doubt the biggest problem. For some people, gas will still be preferable until electric charging speed is close to gas AND speedy charging units are as available as gas stations AND batteries match the range of gas tanks (my new subaru gets like 500 miles on a full tank when driving on the interstate which is super convenient and good luck getting long distance rural drivers to switch without the 3 problems I cited).
It's too far out to say if electric cars/dynamic grid/renewable energy will revolunatize our planets energy usage since we are very entrenched in the current system (and anyone claiming anything beyond 5 years underestimates how fast shit changes IMO) but I am seriously excited about these changes with how much the economics have been improving for a clean energy society.
I’m a lot more pessimistic than you about the rate of change. I recently went through Eureka (California) and most of the cafes and restaurants there did not accept Apple Pay, contactless payment, or even chip and pin payment. Eventually we found a place that did accept Apple Pay so we could eat.
While Apple Pay itself is only about four years old, contactless payment has been fairly standard in the UK for about 10 years, and chip and pin is over 20 years old.
I'm no electrical engineer, but I think we can do some napkin math.
80khw battery in an average model s * 300000000 million cars / (3,911,000,000,000 kwh energy use in the in all of 2015 [2] / 365 days per year) = 2.239 times as much storage in cars on the road versus energy usage which seems pretty doable. Also, it also gets better because as car batteries age and their storage / weight goes down, you can replace them with new ones and put the old ones in grid storage locations where weight / storage does not matter and run them till they are literally dead.
[1]: about a little less than 1 per person (just rough estimating here)
1. We need to eventually switch our winter gas heaters to electric which while helping balance summer vs winter electric usage, electric heating isn't as efficient and we have to increase the outside air a lot more in the winter than we have to cool it in the summer (for most people at least).
2. I forgot to add in the extra electric demand needed to power the cars which is currently powered by oil.
I heard that a long time ago and thinking back on it, I think it was due to the fact that most electricity comes from burning other stuff so the overall efficiency of burning something to make electricity (definitely not 100%), then transporting over lines to your house, then converting that into heat to warm your home is less efficient than just burning it at your house and using the heat directly.
For swimming pools, which are admittedly a special case, heat pumps are already cheaper to operate than gas heaters in most of the country.
(They’re special for several reasons. A big one is that they have huge thermal mass, so your heat pump can operate at whatever time of day you want. This means you can optimize for electric rates vs outdoor temperature. Heat pumps, unlike gas boilers, are considerably more efficient when it’s warm out.)
Many things in a home produce 'waste' heat (TV, people, pets, etc) which needs to be cooled in the summer but it is useful in the winter. Further, AC's end up condensing moisture from the air which takes crazy amounts of energy.
So, heat pump efficiency vs temperature only tells part of the story. With good insulation you will almost always need more cooling in the summer than heating in the winter outside of the arctic circle.
Ground source heat pumps have a typical efficiency of about 400%. You're moving heat from the ground to your house rather than heating up the air, so you get considerably more useful energy out of the system than you put in.
Heating water with electricity is three times more expensive than heating it with gas in my market (The Netherlands). That turns a monthly bill of 60 EUR for gas warming into a bill of 180 EUR if you just switch like-for-like. A 3:1 ratio.
Ground heat-pumps are being championed as a cost effective replacement for keeping houses warm. They provide a 4:1 heat:electricity ratio so have lower running costs than gas. They can also be attached to sun panels and can work with storage heaters (heat the water when the sun shines, use it when it doesn't).
Unfortunately pumps are expensive and very invasive to install in existing houses - you need to dig gardens up to lay the pipes and installation for an average house is about 15-20k EUR ($17k-$23k).
> Right, but our ingenuity and understanding of the physics may well not be perfect.
Our understanding of gravity is pretty much the same as Newton's in how we can utilize it. We know its not perfect but that doesn't change the reality. And ironically, battery chemistry is better understood than gravity.
Battery technology might not be a limitless path, but wouldn't super-capacitors have more potential? The ability to store large amounts of power very very quickly and for a decent amount of time could be an important addition to energy management, if such capacitors could be commercially viable and practical.
Supercapacitors are already commercially viable. I have one in my cheap dashcam because it withstands high temperatures better than a battery. The only problem is that their energy density is 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than lithium-ion batteries.
Ah yes, I actually have one in my dashcam too! Oops. As you can see this is an area I don't know much about.
I was more thinking along the lines of larger 'industrial' scale capacitors, but I'm not sure if there are fundamental barriers physical that can't be overcome to make such devices a sensible route to pursue?
One energy storage method that's relatively cheap, efficient, and scalable is pumped-storage hydroelectricity. There's a 3 GW plant in Virginia that's been in operation since the 80s[1]! There is ultimately minimal need for FF peakers, or large rare-earth batteries, if governments can execute projects like this.
> My guess is that energy will be so cheap, we produce much much more than we consume in the future
Nuclear power promised "too cheap to meter" and of course this never materialised, because someone does actually have to pay the capital and operating costs.
While spot prices may drift around all over the place, and renewable guaranteed price floors will continue to lower gradually, I wouldn't expect retail electricity to get much cheaper soon.
Solar power currently generates less than 1% of the energy consumed in the U.S. [1] Solar power is not currently displacing fossil fuel use — it’s merely contributing to the growth in consumption.
In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe), developed countries must reach zero CO2 emissions by 2035. We need to be reducing emissions about 10% per year. Instead, emissions are increasing by about 2% per year.
If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels. They have a limited lifespan, and then you have to replace them. By that time, our economy must not be running on fossil fuels, so how will those cars be replaced?
Even solar panels require fossil fuels to be manufactured and transported.
In sum, at the moment, we’re actively robbing from the future in order to appear to be heading toward sustainability.
How is the aluminum mined and smelted? How is the tempered glass made? How are the other trace elements mined, transported, and refined? Once they’re manufactured, how do they travel to their installation location? There have been lots of studies on the carbon footprint of solar panel manufacturing. Generally, they’re considered to “pay off” in terms of energy production after about 5 years. (They have a 25year lifetime, btw)
In a world where the economy must be carbon neutral to negative, none of that manufacturing and transportation infrastructure can be run on fossil fuels.
To be fair, they usually have a warrantied lifespan of 25 years... and as solar cells start degrading, their output drops off in a gradual linear fashion.
At 25 years, solar panels still produce between 80% and 87% of their manufactured capacity. At 50 years, they should still produce between 60% and 75% of their manufactured capacity.
It's quite possible that solar panels could have much longer life spans. There isn't a lot of data yet, but there are some indications that they'll be performing well.
A 33W solar panel (Arco Solar 16-2000) actually outperformed it’s original factory specifications 30 years after it was manufactured
World`s first modern solar panel still works after 60 years
Kyocera has reported several solar power installations that continue to operate reliably and generate electricity even though they are nearly 30 years old
The big problems in longevity at the moment are batteries and inverters that typically have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years.
When I build my off-grid solar system, I'm planning to use NiFi batteries (Nickel Iron) that have lifespans in the hundreds of years with minimal maintenance. They're larger and hold less capacity, but don't damage themselves when over/under charged and use materials a lot more available than modern high-density battery storage technologies.
I haven't seen a long-life inverter yet and that's frustrating. Inverter manufacturers have thin margins and competition, so they focus on lowering costs rather than redundancy and hardening.
I used Nickel Iron batteries in an off grid system. They were already 30years old. Unfortunately, they were too difficult to work with, requiring non standard voltages and maintence. You’ll need charge controllers and inverters that understand the different chemistry. I know of two other people who used them and eventually switched to lead acid batteries.
(P.S. I wonder why my comments above were downvoted?)
>> (P.S. I wonder why my comments above were downvoted?)
I didn't downvote you but a lot of your claims come off as over the top fearmongering and/or ignorant. I'll try and counter with your 2 main points that I see:
> In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe)
This one I just haven't really heard about how a 2°C temperature increase would be a global catastrophe. I've read that it will improve certain countries farming and hurt others. Overall, not much out of speculation how it will affect humans in the grand scheme of things. (I agree that it will be really bad for other species like the great barrier reef which I am really sad about but most people don't care about that, they just want to improve their own life and cheap energy is massively beneficial to people which currently outweighs the cost even if it is currently costing the plant).
> If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels.
No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies. We just don't do it because it is too expensive to switch all at once. However, if renewables and batteries keep improving like they do, fossil fuels get too expensive once we run out of ones to cheapy extract, we will end up that way (the latter which is guaranteed no matter what happens as fossil fuels are limited). Pretty much every government even china and the Saudis recognize this which is why everyone is subsidising/investing in renewable energy and taxing fossil fuels to get renewables cheaper.
Regarding 2° being a catastrophe — that’s how James Hanson described it. The Paris Agreement picked 2° as some kind of politically attainable goal. It’s not a safe limit for human civilization as we know it.
> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies
I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).
Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?
This is why I'm pretty gloomy on climate change, I can't see politicians or even the general public accepting lower consumption even though that is what we need to fix the problem.
I wonder what will happen to the price of oil as we switch to electric vehicles. Could we end up increasing demand elsewhere in the energy economy as the price falls?
High-voltage direct current has losses of less than 3% per 1000km according to the Wikipedia article. That's not China-to-US stuff but definitely low enough to move energy around in Europe.
And they do. Up to 3-4GW of the power (maybe 10% of typical power demand) in the UK is imported from its neighbours - some Ireland and the Netherlands, lots of France - at the moment.
The French have a LOT of Nuclear power, and idling a nuclear power station, though possible, is economic insanity, so it makes sense to sell it at a discount to the British.
It's worth noting that this is a two-way street; GB sometimes exports electricity, particularly to Ireland when there's not much wind, but also sometimes to France.
Losses have to exceed 65% (i.e. 350 watts at the socket from 1,000 watts at source) for that to make worldwide solar load balancing a bad idea with current technology.
everyone on hackernews knows this stuff. yet every renewable posts gets these "but there is no sun at night" posts to the top.
build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess.
It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
Won't even be that hard I think, or less hard than we imagine. Electric vehicles will bring widespread distributed storage 'organically'.
At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0].
There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019.
So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are.
France doesn't plan to drive other energy out of business, we plan to diversify (with the ageing of some of our older reactor, replace them with solar and wind so we decrease to 50% nuclear). We still have a lot of hydro power with no plan to touch it, and we don't want to replace all nuclear by solar/wind either.
The electric power produced by "peaker plants" (e.g. gas turbines, hydroelectric, pumped storage) will become more important. If there aren't enough of those, the cost to buy power from peaker plants will rise and investors will build more of them.
More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production.
Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online.
Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
France has never relied on FF energy in the first place. They have a modern, well run nuclear program, lots of hydroelectric, a few geothermal, and FF power plants as well.
Technically, they were running their economy by burning wood/fats/oils for hundreds of years. However, in the context of energy, what matters most is what's happening right now and the total sum of global emissions prior to right now.
Sadly, our nuclear program is neither modern nor well run. Our nuclear power plants are old and some are at the limit of their expiration date. Bad management and lobbying has made a huge gap in the knowledge of power plant building and management and now the price of new construction skyrockets.
From an American POV, your nuclear program is modern and well run. America's nuclear program is pretty embarrassing in comparison. Even older tech, well past expiration heavily reliant on government subsidies.
I think we have to shape demand. Right now people use eletricity whenever they feel like it. I think people will need adjust their lives around when energy is cheap - eg wash clothes on windy days, A/C only runs during the day, have cooler houses on cold, windless nights.
You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory
PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.
There are lots of green energy funds. If you ask at most European banks, they will put you touch with their "wealth" team where you can pick a managed portfolio or fund to invest in. It may also be a checkbox you can tick on your pension scheme.
I wonder if it could ever make sense to have ultra-high voltage or superconductive power transmission lines wrapping around the planet so that we could take advantage of the fact that it's always daytime somewhere to forgo much grid-scale storage and instead just get electricity from wherever it's daylight. Aside from the geopolitical/national security issues, I wonder if such a thing is feasible or it's ultimately going to be more efficient to store energy than transmit it half-way around the world.
Anything is possible. We could power the entire US if we put a large collection of panels in the desert. Surprised there aren't self cleaning panels yet (maybe there are) :).
It might be useful for above-ground water reservoirs. They sometimes float balls on their surface to reduce evaporation in hot environments (especially ones with a breeze). If you could do the same with large arrays of floating solar panels, you could reduce evaporation and get energy out of it at the same time.
I thought that was proven over a hundred years ago to not be an efficient way to carry electricity over long distances.. did something change recently?
Low voltage DC was bad. It had to be low voltage because there were only motor-generator, expensive and inefficient transformers for DC. Today, all conversions can be done in solid-state electronics. DC to AC and DC to different voltage DC are still more expensive and lossy than AC-AC, but sometimes the best option in a given situation.
DC-AC and DC-DC are just conversions - conversions used to be the problem with DC for distribution. For HVDC in an AC net you need AC-DC (not much of a problem) and DC-AC (more difficult, solved with only minor losses today).
The advantages of DC transmission are flexibility (can have power flow either way between any unsynchronized AC nets) and lower transmission losses per distance. The details are all on Wikipedia.
Curious how this would work from a practical standpoint? Could planes fly through it? How high off the ground would the light be beamed? Could a boat pass through it's path?
I know absolutely nothing about this area so just generally curious!
Thankyou - that was entirely deliberate, you can only get humour past the HN voting system if either it's totally deadpan or you explain the joke in the same comment.
wouldn't the energy efficiency be low? effectively: light source -> PV panels, focus etc are bound to be difficult (long distance so parallel rays, any tiny deviation... well schlieren photography) and then there's diffuse scattering
Originally I always fantasized about such tech but the technology required to develop this super conductor then produce it in the volumes needed, just think of all the communication cables that have been laid just seems insurmountable.
I think the best bet is finding more storage alternatives that can be replicated on a large scale and don't require any rare earth elements and localized enough to not worry abut shifting political alliances
The recommended transmission strength would be 230 W/m² in the center of the beam. This is about a quarter the strength of full sunlight, and is thought to be a safe level through which aircraft and birds can fly.
At this level, our 3.6 km diameter collecting area would generate about 40 GWh of energy in a day, at an assumed reception/conversion efficiency of 70%. By comparison, a flat array of 15%-efficient PV panels occupying the same area in the Mojave Desert would generate about a fourth as much energy averaged over the year
Does the 30% lost efficiency bleed into the environment as heat energy? While it's not as damaging as greenhouse gases, we should try to avoid adding more heat to our environment if possible. Especially when considering planetary-scale space power production and transmission.
I remember reading about a way to radiate heat energy from AC units directly to space.
"The panels do this by emitting heat at infrared wavelengths between 8 and 13 micrometers. To these waves, the Earth’s atmosphere is transparent. What’s more, the panels reflect nearly all the sunlight falling on them." [1]
Perhaps the same general concept could be used to transmit energy from space to earth while lowering interaction with the atmosphere.
I don't think that "30% efficiency/loss" is the best way to think about this. Instead, think of it as "extra amount of sunlight reaching Earth" (and subtract the extra amount of radiation, which would probably be a second-order effect). If you've a 100m mirror illuminating the night-side of the planet, you'll need a k \* 100m size mirror shading the day-side part... And you'll probably need to calibrate this depending on the region you illuminate/shade as different parts of the Earth reflect/absorb different amounts of sunlight ("efficiency loss" I guess).
All in all, a very interesting problem indeed! I can't wait until humanity can "afford" such large-scale geo-engineering.
Electricity transmission would be a foundational part of an orbital ring around Earth. And around a dynamo like Uranus, it could be used to generate electricity too.
Could you store renewable energy via electrolysis, and instead of having storage tanks of dangerous hydrogen at home, pump the gas back into a grid? Most houses have natural gas lines and those are relatively safe. Would it be viable to have "hydrogen lines" that just ran in reverse when excess renewable energy is produced? Then draw off it to a home fuel cell during peak demand?
You would do this at home because that is where residential PV is located. Of course it's more obvious to send the power back down the wire and, as you said, convert to hydrogen centrally.
My question looks silly now in contrast, but it was thought up considering that grid buyback isn't going so well in the us, and focusing on a safe way to store and use hydrogen as a battery competing with flywheels or lithium battery cells, or centralized pumped hydro, etc. Just a hypothetical.
I keep wondering about the Solar Sinter project by Markus Kayser *
What if instead of manufacturing artwork, it manufactured a mechanical energy storage, large enough to store either daily variations or even yearly insolation?
Perhaps glass blocks (filled with sand) as weights for storing as potential energy (how deep would a shaft have to be to store daily or yearly insolation, assuming the weight is ideally half as tall as the shaft?)
Perhaps storing compressed (even liquified?) air? How airtight is the resulting sintered glass?
Perhaps making 1 upper reservoir and somehow digging a narrow shaft (making the walls glass while digging/blowing up the sand through the already vitrified upper part of the shaft? Then somehow building the lower underground reservoir from the inside out, and store potential energy in the closed system containing water (condensed from air?)
Solar panels, wiring, cheap plastic Fresnel lenses, control electronics would need to keep getting supplied to attach to newly built energy storages. But as much as possible, especially things that wear out should be renewably built from glass onsite (for example scoops to move and redistribute sand)
In example consider an NxN square of already completed storage, sites then there is ~ 4N adjacent sites under construction so the project either could speed up by actually building ~N/4 circumference layers at a time, or start delivering ~(N-4)N of renewable on-demand energy (since the storage site height was chosen to have enough capacity to store daily, weekly or yearly insolation)
ok I calculated the height/depth for a shaft housing a glass weight half the size (which is the optimal height for the weight in any shaft of fixed height, I assume you understand this is optimum, if you want a derivation I can provide it upon request)
For clear skies (typical of deserts), we can use the daily insolation at sea level: 21,6 MJ/m^2
(I will ignore inefficiency of solar panel, the less efficient, the less deep or tall we need to store the energy generated, and one time construction of the storage is preferable over reconstructing the weights and shafts once more efficient panels become available)
So if we want to store it as potential energy of a glass weight under the solar panel that generated the energy we have for each square meter of panel:
a glass weight with cross section one scquare meter, and height l = L/2 where L is the height of the shaft.
glass weights 2500 kg/m^3, so we have mass of the weight: m = l * 1 m^2 * 2500 kg/m^3 = l * 2500 kg/m = L/2 * 2500 kg/m
We want the weight to be at all times contained in the shaft so it can be closed and sand can not blow under the weight or into the mechanisms.
the height difference for the glass weigh at the top -but still completely inside the shaft- to the bottom -but also still completely inside the shaft- is h = L - l/2 - l/2 = L -l = L - L/2 = L/2
The potential energy difference for a weight of mass m and vertical travel distance h is E = m * g * h
Plugging everything together:
E = ( L/2 * 2500 kg/m * 9.81 N/kg * L/2 )
Solving for L = 2 * sqrt ( E / (2500 * 9,81 N/m))
Since the assumed insolation is 21.6 MJ/m^2 then one square meter of (ideal futuristic) solar panel will simply generate 21.6 MJ = 21,6 MNm
Plugging into the equation for L we get L = 59,35 m
I seeriously underestimated potential energy I guess, I thought it would have been larger.
If your panels are less efficient (say 10%) or you have a large unused area you can of course make the structure less tall/deep.
Please forgive me if this is a stupid question - but is heavily investing in solar electricity a good idea in Europe considering the variation in climate throughout the year?
Energy demand is highest in the Winter, when mean monthly sunshine hours are at the lowest.
Even in Nice (the very south of France) where I assume this difference would be smaller, there's still a big gap between 347.5 mean hours in July and 139.3 mean hours in December (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice#Climate).
Surely we'd need to heavily invest in backup generation capacity that would be dormant for the vast majority of the summer then heavily in use over the winter?
Admittedly I have a very limited amount of knowledge in this area - but wouldn't wind or tidal power generation be a better bet here (well, Europe anyway)?
I'm not sure about France, but it's rare to have air con in the UK because the summers aren't hot enough :) I think a lot of Europe is similar in this regard (with the exception being the south).
Even if France does have a reasonable number of air con units installed, I would expect energy consumption to be higher in the winter due to shorter days etc. It would be good to see statistics though.
125 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadIf they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?
Granted, due to the cost structure of nuclear, it makes sense to run flat out if possible, but technically it's not necessary.
If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
Didn't know about that, which ones? I thought it was natural gas plants?
[1] looks like a small list
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...
This is not going well, with boiler and legal issues meaning a plant which was supposed to open in 2013 is to open 7 years later in 2020. Making it not exactly a great poster child for how to build a coal power plant. Being in construction for 13 years is not cheap and fast.
[1] https://endcoal.org/tracker/
Kind of funny that "big coal" is now suffering from a problem that nuclear has struggled with for a long time.
- 3 plants (Lünen, Profen and Niederaußem) have apparently been cancelled.
- The promoter of Kalkar-Appeldorn has applied for a permit
- The one of Stade has gotten one, but there is a lawsuit against that
- Datteln replaces a plant that was shut down in 2014, though the old plant only had about 1/3 of the power.
Meanwhile, coal power plants are being shut down without being replaced all the time.
Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering.
I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power.
What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
Chem engineer here, battery technology doesnt seem to be a guarantee to improve.
Batteries are limited by the physics of our universe. The chemistry between two chemicals will not change, and it feels like we have exhausted every option.
This is a non trivial problem and I am unsure if I expect a solution.
In 2 decades there will be hundreds of millions of electric cars in the world which currently do not exist. This is a huge increase in battery power even with battery technology not changing in the next 2 decades.
However, I do expect cost improvements. Even if the cost to make a battery is constant when measured in joules, PV is getting cheaper and can supply more joules for less money.
It's too far out to say if electric cars/dynamic grid/renewable energy will revolunatize our planets energy usage since we are very entrenched in the current system (and anyone claiming anything beyond 5 years underestimates how fast shit changes IMO) but I am seriously excited about these changes with how much the economics have been improving for a clean energy society.
While Apple Pay itself is only about four years old, contactless payment has been fairly standard in the UK for about 10 years, and chip and pin is over 20 years old.
80khw battery in an average model s * 300000000 million cars / (3,911,000,000,000 kwh energy use in the in all of 2015 [2] / 365 days per year) = 2.239 times as much storage in cars on the road versus energy usage which seems pretty doable. Also, it also gets better because as car batteries age and their storage / weight goes down, you can replace them with new ones and put the old ones in grid storage locations where weight / storage does not matter and run them till they are literally dead.
[1]: about a little less than 1 per person (just rough estimating here)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
1. We need to eventually switch our winter gas heaters to electric which while helping balance summer vs winter electric usage, electric heating isn't as efficient and we have to increase the outside air a lot more in the winter than we have to cool it in the summer (for most people at least).
2. I forgot to add in the extra electric demand needed to power the cars which is currently powered by oil.
(They’re special for several reasons. A big one is that they have huge thermal mass, so your heat pump can operate at whatever time of day you want. This means you can optimize for electric rates vs outdoor temperature. Heat pumps, unlike gas boilers, are considerably more efficient when it’s warm out.)
So, heat pump efficiency vs temperature only tells part of the story. With good insulation you will almost always need more cooling in the summer than heating in the winter outside of the arctic circle.
Ground source heat pumps have a typical efficiency of about 400%. You're moving heat from the ground to your house rather than heating up the air, so you get considerably more useful energy out of the system than you put in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump
Ground heat-pumps are being championed as a cost effective replacement for keeping houses warm. They provide a 4:1 heat:electricity ratio so have lower running costs than gas. They can also be attached to sun panels and can work with storage heaters (heat the water when the sun shines, use it when it doesn't).
Unfortunately pumps are expensive and very invasive to install in existing houses - you need to dig gardens up to lay the pipes and installation for an average house is about 15-20k EUR ($17k-$23k).
Right, but our ingenuity and understanding of the physics may well not be perfect. Didn’t Moore’s law continue on well past it’s sell-by-date?
Our understanding of gravity is pretty much the same as Newton's in how we can utilize it. We know its not perfect but that doesn't change the reality. And ironically, battery chemistry is better understood than gravity.
I suspect anyone from Newton’s day would be surprised to see an A380.
I was more thinking along the lines of larger 'industrial' scale capacitors, but I'm not sure if there are fundamental barriers physical that can't be overcome to make such devices a sensible route to pursue?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Nuclear power promised "too cheap to meter" and of course this never materialised, because someone does actually have to pay the capital and operating costs.
While spot prices may drift around all over the place, and renewable guaranteed price floors will continue to lower gradually, I wouldn't expect retail electricity to get much cheaper soon.
In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe), developed countries must reach zero CO2 emissions by 2035. We need to be reducing emissions about 10% per year. Instead, emissions are increasing by about 2% per year.
If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels. They have a limited lifespan, and then you have to replace them. By that time, our economy must not be running on fossil fuels, so how will those cars be replaced?
Even solar panels require fossil fuels to be manufactured and transported.
In sum, at the moment, we’re actively robbing from the future in order to appear to be heading toward sustainability.
[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
In a world where the economy must be carbon neutral to negative, none of that manufacturing and transportation infrastructure can be run on fossil fuels.
At 25 years, solar panels still produce between 80% and 87% of their manufactured capacity. At 50 years, they should still produce between 60% and 75% of their manufactured capacity.
It's quite possible that solar panels could have much longer life spans. There isn't a lot of data yet, but there are some indications that they'll be performing well.
A 33W solar panel (Arco Solar 16-2000) actually outperformed it’s original factory specifications 30 years after it was manufactured
World`s first modern solar panel still works after 60 years
Kyocera has reported several solar power installations that continue to operate reliably and generate electricity even though they are nearly 30 years old
The big problems in longevity at the moment are batteries and inverters that typically have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years.
When I build my off-grid solar system, I'm planning to use NiFi batteries (Nickel Iron) that have lifespans in the hundreds of years with minimal maintenance. They're larger and hold less capacity, but don't damage themselves when over/under charged and use materials a lot more available than modern high-density battery storage technologies.
I haven't seen a long-life inverter yet and that's frustrating. Inverter manufacturers have thin margins and competition, so they focus on lowering costs rather than redundancy and hardening.
(P.S. I wonder why my comments above were downvoted?)
I didn't downvote you but a lot of your claims come off as over the top fearmongering and/or ignorant. I'll try and counter with your 2 main points that I see:
> In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe)
This one I just haven't really heard about how a 2°C temperature increase would be a global catastrophe. I've read that it will improve certain countries farming and hurt others. Overall, not much out of speculation how it will affect humans in the grand scheme of things. (I agree that it will be really bad for other species like the great barrier reef which I am really sad about but most people don't care about that, they just want to improve their own life and cheap energy is massively beneficial to people which currently outweighs the cost even if it is currently costing the plant).
> If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels.
No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies. We just don't do it because it is too expensive to switch all at once. However, if renewables and batteries keep improving like they do, fossil fuels get too expensive once we run out of ones to cheapy extract, we will end up that way (the latter which is guaranteed no matter what happens as fossil fuels are limited). Pretty much every government even china and the Saudis recognize this which is why everyone is subsidising/investing in renewable energy and taxing fossil fuels to get renewables cheaper.
There’s also this recent paper which got a lot of press http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies
I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).
Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?
The French have a LOT of Nuclear power, and idling a nuclear power station, though possible, is economic insanity, so it makes sense to sell it at a discount to the British.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...
build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess. It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0].
There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019.
So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo
More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production.
Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online.
Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by...
Just look at the years in which the reactors were constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Franc...
Yes, they are.
https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-s...
or
https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-ins...
You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory
PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.
Or is this out of reach for the small "retail investors"...
I subscribed some years ago and it's been the second year that they've raised their action by 2%.
The longest undersea power line is 580km by comparison, so that' not a huge issue.
If we assume 200km has 1% power loss then 20,000km is around 63% power loss.
High voltage dc might be another option to minimize losses.
I thought that was proven over a hundred years ago to not be an efficient way to carry electricity over long distances.. did something change recently?
Ok, what's a situation involving long distance transmission where DC-AC or DC-DC is best?
The advantages of DC transmission are flexibility (can have power flow either way between any unsynchronized AC nets) and lower transmission losses per distance. The details are all on Wikipedia.
If they could get it down to 1% per 1000 km, then it's only ~18% (for some value of only).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
I know absolutely nothing about this area so just generally curious!
2) The death ray is an environmental and safety hazard
3) Atmospheric attenuation would probably be more than electrical attenuation at that distance
I think the best bet is finding more storage alternatives that can be replicated on a large scale and don't require any rare earth elements and localized enough to not worry abut shifting political alliances
The weapons part would probably be bonus for some..
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
The recommended transmission strength would be 230 W/m² in the center of the beam. This is about a quarter the strength of full sunlight, and is thought to be a safe level through which aircraft and birds can fly.
At this level, our 3.6 km diameter collecting area would generate about 40 GWh of energy in a day, at an assumed reception/conversion efficiency of 70%. By comparison, a flat array of 15%-efficient PV panels occupying the same area in the Mojave Desert would generate about a fourth as much energy averaged over the year
I remember reading about a way to radiate heat energy from AC units directly to space.
"The panels do this by emitting heat at infrared wavelengths between 8 and 13 micrometers. To these waves, the Earth’s atmosphere is transparent. What’s more, the panels reflect nearly all the sunlight falling on them." [1]
Perhaps the same general concept could be used to transmit energy from space to earth while lowering interaction with the atmosphere.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/solar/effici...
I don't think that "30% efficiency/loss" is the best way to think about this. Instead, think of it as "extra amount of sunlight reaching Earth" (and subtract the extra amount of radiation, which would probably be a second-order effect). If you've a 100m mirror illuminating the night-side of the planet, you'll need a k \* 100m size mirror shading the day-side part... And you'll probably need to calibrate this depending on the region you illuminate/shade as different parts of the Earth reflect/absorb different amounts of sunlight ("efficiency loss" I guess).
All in all, a very interesting problem indeed! I can't wait until humanity can "afford" such large-scale geo-engineering.
This (long) video about orbital rings brings such things to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
You can incorporate hydrogen into the grid but only up to a point: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/06/hydrogen/ and it has issues https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/51995.pdf
My question looks silly now in contrast, but it was thought up considering that grid buyback isn't going so well in the us, and focusing on a safe way to store and use hydrogen as a battery competing with flywheels or lithium battery cells, or centralized pumped hydro, etc. Just a hypothetical.
What if instead of manufacturing artwork, it manufactured a mechanical energy storage, large enough to store either daily variations or even yearly insolation?
Perhaps glass blocks (filled with sand) as weights for storing as potential energy (how deep would a shaft have to be to store daily or yearly insolation, assuming the weight is ideally half as tall as the shaft?)
Perhaps storing compressed (even liquified?) air? How airtight is the resulting sintered glass?
Perhaps making 1 upper reservoir and somehow digging a narrow shaft (making the walls glass while digging/blowing up the sand through the already vitrified upper part of the shaft? Then somehow building the lower underground reservoir from the inside out, and store potential energy in the closed system containing water (condensed from air?)
Solar panels, wiring, cheap plastic Fresnel lenses, control electronics would need to keep getting supplied to attach to newly built energy storages. But as much as possible, especially things that wear out should be renewably built from glass onsite (for example scoops to move and redistribute sand)
In example consider an NxN square of already completed storage, sites then there is ~ 4N adjacent sites under construction so the project either could speed up by actually building ~N/4 circumference layers at a time, or start delivering ~(N-4)N of renewable on-demand energy (since the storage site height was chosen to have enough capacity to store daily, weekly or yearly insolation)
* https://kayserworks.com/
For clear skies (typical of deserts), we can use the daily insolation at sea level: 21,6 MJ/m^2
(I will ignore inefficiency of solar panel, the less efficient, the less deep or tall we need to store the energy generated, and one time construction of the storage is preferable over reconstructing the weights and shafts once more efficient panels become available)
So if we want to store it as potential energy of a glass weight under the solar panel that generated the energy we have for each square meter of panel:
a glass weight with cross section one scquare meter, and height l = L/2 where L is the height of the shaft.
glass weights 2500 kg/m^3, so we have mass of the weight: m = l * 1 m^2 * 2500 kg/m^3 = l * 2500 kg/m = L/2 * 2500 kg/m
We want the weight to be at all times contained in the shaft so it can be closed and sand can not blow under the weight or into the mechanisms.
the height difference for the glass weigh at the top -but still completely inside the shaft- to the bottom -but also still completely inside the shaft- is h = L - l/2 - l/2 = L -l = L - L/2 = L/2
The potential energy difference for a weight of mass m and vertical travel distance h is E = m * g * h
Plugging everything together:
E = ( L/2 * 2500 kg/m * 9.81 N/kg * L/2 )
Solving for L = 2 * sqrt ( E / (2500 * 9,81 N/m))
Since the assumed insolation is 21.6 MJ/m^2 then one square meter of (ideal futuristic) solar panel will simply generate 21.6 MJ = 21,6 MNm
Plugging into the equation for L we get L = 59,35 m
I seeriously underestimated potential energy I guess, I thought it would have been larger.
If your panels are less efficient (say 10%) or you have a large unused area you can of course make the structure less tall/deep.
Energy demand is highest in the Winter, when mean monthly sunshine hours are at the lowest.
Even in Nice (the very south of France) where I assume this difference would be smaller, there's still a big gap between 347.5 mean hours in July and 139.3 mean hours in December (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice#Climate).
Surely we'd need to heavily invest in backup generation capacity that would be dormant for the vast majority of the summer then heavily in use over the winter?
Admittedly I have a very limited amount of knowledge in this area - but wouldn't wind or tidal power generation be a better bet here (well, Europe anyway)?
Even if France does have a reasonable number of air con units installed, I would expect energy consumption to be higher in the winter due to shorter days etc. It would be good to see statistics though.
Consumption is much higher in winter than summer (summer is actually the period of the year with the lowest consumption).
https://goo.gl/images/mdRj1r