This is better. Terraform believes they can make methane from the air for cheaper than it can be extracted from the ground, leading to a preference for "carbon neutral" fuels. Part of their thesis though is the requirement for solar to keep getting cheaper and cheaper (as it has).
Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.
Do you have any uses for the plant, or does it create interesting byproducts for you? Photosynthesis is not very efficient, but it is great at making complex organic molecules like sugar or cellulose.
But a plant needs more than power. It needs nutrients, usually in the form of fertilizer.
They also don't generally make hydrogen, not directly at least.
Another thing to consider: plants currently require a lot of natural gas or other fossil fuels to grow. Droughts and heat waves can disrupt production.
These are orthogonal concepts this is an attempt to create a carbon neutral hydrocarbon for energy use, the other is an attempt at carbon negative sequestration.
The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.
HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough renewables generation, considering existing curtailment), battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build, Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin.
Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.
> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”
If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time (for building heating purposes).
Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
Absolutely. California alone is curtailing enormous amounts of renewables, hundreds of thousands of MWh/month (depending on the season). That is literally clean energy being thrown away (which, depending on system design, is variably tolerable; you're balancing cost, transmission congestion, and renewables offsetting fossil combustion). More transmission, more batteries, more storage, more load shifting (both temporal and geographic)? All of the above.
California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates remove all incentive for load shifting.
Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.
I blame the CPUC for basically everything regarding the crappiness of being a grid customer in California. PG&E is exactly the result you'd expect to get in our regulatory environment.
Our regulators rubber stamp every tariff plan the company puts forth, and lets them get a larger profit margin on capex vs opex. So of course the optimal strategy is to run all equipment to failure and replace it with maximally expensive everything as frequently as possible.
At that price of 37.4 cente per kWh and up I'm quite serious when I say that if I suddenly found myself owning a California house, I'd buy enough solar to meet my load needs, install a shitload of telecom grade 4000 cycle rated lifepo4 batteries (4.9kWh is about $1700 per module), charging setup, inverters etc and go off grid.
Maybe keep the grid link attached to a meter and 100A panel hooked up to nothing if needed for municipal compliance reasons.
That's pretty much what I'm doing, and for that reason.
I don't have a great explanation for why it isn't happening faster, but I predict a substantial exodus from the California grid. Especially so in places with gas bans or among folks who electrify of their own accord.
One of my favorite high(ish)-concept energy storage proposals takes the "store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time" is the "sun in a box"[0] idea: use excess electricity to heat silicon up to an incandescent 4500 deg F. Later, when you want to extract the store energy, just shine some of that incandescent light into some super efficient multi-junction solar panels!
Sounds pretty wild but apparently scales up very well thanks the to square cube law.
Very inefficient compared to heat pumps or even peltiers for that matter.
> store heat in tanks
Oh I already do something similar at home for sub-ambient cooling but I wouldn’t call it cheap.
> If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low
IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this
park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...
> IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”
The premise of the article is that the $/Wh cost from PV will become extremely low, faster than most people think. Do you have a reason to believe this is inaccurate?
On one hand it’s an interesting engineering challenge, but I am always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an ecosystem with glass is “good for the environment”. It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
I'm not saying pave over the mojave desert with PV, exactly, rather that a dry salt pan or ecosystem that has an absolute minimum of flora and fauna would be preferable.
Unfortunately the inhabitants of the Mojave turned down a major solar power project last year because of ecological disruption", aka "this wouldn't be pretty on our nature hikes."
Perhaps we can use the Salton Sea? It is at least acknowledged as a truly destroyed ecosystem.
I am sort of a nimby, but there's nowhere wild to protect anymore. Thanks Starlink!
I am less and less sympathetic to groups standing in the way of clean energy production because of any aesthetics issue.
However, I don't live there so I won't judge, though a wind farm got knocked back near where I live because it'd look like a windfarm and it was the greenies who knocked it back.
Matter of interpretation. Is humanity at all good for the environment? Some would say no. Solar is clean and deserts are mostly, well, deserts. And climate change seems much worse than having a tiny bit of our deserts being used for PV farms.
Hundreds of square km is not a lot, and the ecosystems where these systems would be installed are typically not rich havens of life. The US's power consumption would require about 6000-9000 sq km of solar panels (assuming ~15% efficiency) For comparison in the US there are about 13000-33000 sq km of parking lots, 93000 sq km of alfalfa cultivation, 69000 sq km of fallow agricultural land, and the mojave desert is about 124000 sq km. Yeah with gross mismanagement you might jeopardize the survival of some rare lizard or something, but it's a very far cry from a silicon wasteland.
The problem with covering a parking lot with solar panels is that it's usually a lot more expensive than covering rural land with solar panels. The panels have to be mounted higher off the ground so vehicles can get beneath them, they're usually expected to have a reasonably visually-appealing design, and all the wiring has to be kept safely out of the way and inaccessible to pedestrians. This drives up costs.
If land was truly scarce, parking lot solar would be a good option but I expect most installations will use the cheaper option of just building solar farms a long ways away from people.
Solar parking lots also might make sense in situations where all the power is being used on-site, and it's cheaper in the long run than buying power from the local utility.
I've never actually been to that city but that's a mid sized sports stadium you see to the left side. Tulsa I think is an extreme example, if you look at an aerial photo of Seattle from the 1970s there were a ton of "downtown" surface lots too, but now the land is way too valuable to use for that.
You can also see what looks like a regulation size baseball diamond to the top right side.
That one image very powerfully captures the total and utter idiocy of car-centric development. Imagine if that thin sprinkling of actual buildings were reconfigured into one dense, car-free urban core…
That isn't car centric development, that is urban development in a city that fell into hard times. The whole area in the picture is about one square mile (i.e. it was the dense core of the city), and during boom times it was full of buildings. Many of the buildings were torn down when their owners could no longer afford to maintain them and they were replaced with parking lots because they look a lot better than overgrown fields. As the city revitalizes, the parking lots will be built over and turned back into buildings.
I suppose we have different standards for what constitutes car-centric development. Even if all those parking lots were built up, I see a whole lot of pavement and not a lot of pedestrian / cycling infrastructure nor greenery (I looked on street view). I mean, there are 18-wheeler semis on those streets!
Add to that urban freeways with enormous junctions ringing this supposedly dense core, cutting off surrounding areas from car-free access.
Yes, the city center has some tall buildings. The car is still dominant on its streets though.
It'a really weird but there's a surprisingly growing base of farming amid a solar farm, where apparently many plants just cant stand the pure sun & benefit from some periodic shade during the day. I dont know how much I believe it but combined agriculture/solar use seems perhaps legit to be a thing.
Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
> Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market.
Curious if you're basing this on firsthand knowledge? I know nothing about solar panels but I've read some stories[0][1] lately about difficulties recycling them, particularly older ones that were deployed 10-20 years ago and are now reaching EOL.
Since the vast majority of PV modules that have ever been installed are still working there isn't much recycling yet. Most of the mass of a PV panel is mundane things like glass and aluminum (and perhaps steel for ground mountings) that are either eminently recyclable or easily disposable in mass.
Solar panels up high can coexist with livestock and feed grass quite well it seems:
> ABC (Australia) RURAL [π]
> Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels
> Sheep grazing under solar panels at farms in NSW's Central West have produced better wool and more of it in the four years since the projects began, according to growers.
> Local graziers have labelled the set-up a "complete win-win", with the sheep helping to keep grass and weeds down so as not to obscure the panels.
> In turn, the panels provided shade for the sheep and grass, and helped prevent the soil from drying out.
It’s known as agrivoltaics [1]. It works especially well with highly shade-tolerant crops like leafy vegetables, stone fruits, berries, etc., but also works with grazing or arable cultivation.
There are various possible configurations of panels that still allow farm machinery to access the crop beneath, and the crop itself is protected from heat stress, wind, heavy rain, and hail. Shading reduces evaporative water loss, lessening the need for irrigation, and the crop has a local cooling effect for the PV panels, which improves their efficiency.
According to an extended report from the Fraunhofer Institute [2], the main challenges are regulatory – at least in Germany, but I imagine similar hurdles in the rest of the EU. Essentially, difficulties obtaining building permits; negation of farming subsidies from enclosure of land; and obstacles to connecting to the grid and receiving feed-in tariffs.
Those challenges all seem surmountable, and there’s surely huge promise in the vast amount of land that would be unlocked for energy generation, never mind the synergies favorable for horticulture in particular.
Good question. A brief search suggests hail is the greatest common hazard to the panels. I guess they’re going to act like a sail in a hurricane or tornado.
We’ve already desertified tens of thousands of square km of land into parking lots / heat sinks. We could start by shading those abominations with solar panels.
Wait until you hear about how we invented synthetic fertilizer and added 5 billion humans in as many as 100 years. Won't somebody think of the ecosystem!
> It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
I read the article, I disagree with the concept of using PV to generate artificial hydrocarbon fuels in general, as not a great business plan. It's not the best use of the technology when we should be bypassing that entirely.
Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir or something if you need energy storage, not drive a complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store in a tank and burn in an engine.
maybe, but it's also a national embarrassment that most of the major population centers in the US Northeast seemingly cannot be connected by 350 km/h high speed rail such as what China has very rapidly built since 2010. Flights of 1-2 hour duration between many locations in North America should be replaced with rail in most scenarios.
either the political will or budget to do this apparently does not exist.
It's clear that the US cannot build high speed rail. Since 2009, California has spent tens of billions on HSR and has nothing to show for it. There are too many hurdles to overcome. Existing rail lines have turns that are too sharp for HSR, so the government must use eminent domain to take people's property. Construction is delayed by environmental reviews. There are issues with noise. You have to build train stations in urban areas where real estate is ridiculously expensive. Smaller towns along the route can threaten to block or delay the rail line unless they get political favors. And so on.
The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening. That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a flight, making flying more competitive for shorter distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll most likely be for shorter flights at first (since battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact, and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new tracks).
HSR in America is a victim of American oligarchy's obsession with de-taxing land.
Same reason why a 2 bed in SF is so absurdly priced.
Higher taxes on land will reduce its value - making land purchases cheaper. This will bring American HSR costs more in line with China's.
China also reduces land acquisition costs by building a lot of elevated HSR and reduces overall HSR costs through economies of scale - something that doesnt work when you limit HSR to one area.
Not necessarily, we could use plain hydrogen. (Could probably even do it with beamed power, but that’s a tech I consider to be insanely unwise to deploy).
Probably going to be the last thing to decarbonize.
Might be able to run off biodiesel or similar. Even if biofuel is double the cost of current dino juice, fuel makes up 20-40% of major airline’s opex, so it’s not like crude-free flying will kill the industry.
Might even be made up with increased aircraft efficiency, more intermediate stop operations (saving 15-30% in fuel by flying 2x medium haul instead of 1x long haul) and better load factors (“revenue management”).
Density is almost irrelevant, all that matters here is cost.
And one order of magnitude is more than enough. But yeah, besides planes and rockets, hydrocarbons are important in several industrial processes. Besides, we don't want to replace all of the cars, trucks and ships in a single decade.
Pumped reservoir storage is horrifically inefficient, environmentally terrible for the local ecosystem, and not scalable. You can't just go and build a reservoir anywhere you like.
Chemical energy storage is simple, scalable, and allows for the easy movement of vast amounts of energy over great distances to be used anywhere with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.
When talking about pumped hydro the roundtrip efficiency usually is around 70-80%. Not even close to batteries but way more scalable.
Chemical storage is horrific. Creating diesel and burning it in a turbine or similar you start at 40-50% for the burning phase, without even converting anything in the first place.
If you go the fuel cell route you tend to end up somewhere at 40-60% efficiency.
So no, the only use case for chemical storage is either where you want energy density. Say aviation or maritime shipping. Or nation state like energy security, where you can pay the efficiency price.
For all other use cases any optimization done, or better usage of the energy, will eat into that horrific round trip efficiency.
How is it as scalable when you're at the mercy of the local geology? There are not that many places where pumped storage is viable, its not just pumping water up to some random hill.
The question rather is, how much pumped storage do you even need when you do geographical decoupling through HVDC interconnections?
Similarly, how bound are you to the local topology? The longest already existing HVDC line in China is 3,293 km (2,046 miles). That brings you from the Rockies to any location within continental US.
Utilize renewables to have bidirectional flow compared to traditional hydro.
Except, it really is just pumping water up a hill. Siting for pumped storage is overwhelmingly easier than for hydro generation. The latter needs a watershed. A dike around a hilltop does not.
Except we have millions of devices now that rely on hydrocarbons that will have to be transition... somehow?
And the infrastructure used to sequester carbon from the air can be turned around and deployed later when we want to sequester carbon without creating hydrocarbons.
I've never made a comment on HN commenting on someone else's tone, but I've seen this exact response, word for word, a lot recently on many posts. I don't like this trend. I find it to be adversarial and in bad faith. Suppose they did read the article. Are they likely to reply to you defending themselves? Next time, please address the actual content of their comment instead.
Not the original poster and perhaps it was adversarial, but I think it is also pretty clear that they did not read the article. Of course, they won't admit that (who wants to admit not reading the article?) so they will reply contextualizing their point to the article.
I'm not sure what to make of your hypothetical question about the GP commenter's likelihood of responding, since the first (and only) response to this when I went to bed was from walrus01, whom I was responding to and had a brief conversation with.
I commented in this way because the article directly addressed the problems with the GP comment, and the GP comment made no mention of it. There's also a pattern on HN and elsewhere of comments popping up in top-level threads made in bad faith to derail and redirect conversation, especially on anything related to power generation or renewables. Telling someone to "address the actual content" is precisely what I was doing.
> The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?
Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline supplies.
if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.
not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
that is a very good point and of course as much as possible should be generated domestically first.
If you open a high res aerial view of any random french or german city right now and look at the roofs of how many warehouses and huge structures are presently covered in PV, versus how many could be covered in PV if we really wanted to, for instance.
We could also cover all the roads with PV, invest highly in saltwater batteries, the global grid , small, modular nuclear reactors, solar desalination, developement help for poor countries by building up a local solar industry etc. etc.
But the world is rather focused on war. Now in the ukraine, but taiwan is building up. I mean, a nuclear holocaust would also reduce CO2 emissions, but seriously, it is so frustrating that there are technological solutions to real problems, but they are just not seriously implemented. We could, but we don't. At least not on a global scale.
> if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime.
This sounds like ⓐ a plausible reason for the Libyan government to refuse any such project; ⓑ a good reason for the Spanish and French to ally with the Libyan government (puppet or otherwise) against the Germans and Italians, or the Germans and Spanish to ally with them against the Italians and French, or whatever; ⓒ unstable after a few decades, when Europe's own military forces are no longer overwhelmingly larger than Libya's.
(Don't think ⓒ can happen in Libya? The Eight-Nation Alliance didn't think it could happen in China either.)
> if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported using our existing infrastructure...
I think it has a good chance of happening with Mike-cannon Brookes and Andrew Forrest pushing it along. I hope it's better protected than the internet subsea cables, those things get cut about once per year.
Cut internet cables is just a matter of statistics, there are simply a lot of these cables so a even individually rare events happen relatively often. Submarine fibre cables already carry significant electrical power for the amplifiers and are well armored, I doubt that elictricity cables would be much better. The issue is typically ships ignoring no-anchor areas, that's also why most of these cuts happen in more unregulated regions.
Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.
Yes, although with our recent election result, it looks like the tide may finally have turned. The pro coal government really sucked. They went from "we support renewables in theory but the economic case isn't there" to "we will do anything possible to continue to burn coal, including buying uneconomic coal power stations whose owners don't want to run them anymore'.
I never understood the laziness of the coal lobby, why would they not want to own the next new energy source en mass. They could have blanketed the hunter and all of FNQLD with arrays and just printed money.
Such a classic stuffy old white man style way of trying to bend the world to their way of thinking. Though it did work for a while, I must admit.
You should visit, it's weirdly close to that, with pretty brutal anti-drug laws and horrible Internet to boot... but super high minimum wages? Not to mention how they treated their people native to the land... somehow rivals what the English/Americans did to the Native Americans, if you can believe it.
It's bizarro land. It's pleasant enough, but it's not hard to see how Americans and Australians are related.
A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor).
Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
It's a reference to the movie Fletch. The main character is an investigative reporter. In one scene, he poses as an airplane mechanic. The real airplane mechanics are not very convinced, and he tries playing it off by saying, "It's all ball bearings nowadays."
the problem is the allocation of the resources in the real economy. the copper production goes somewhere currently. if half of that suddenly would go to making these super long distance cables that would cause brutal inflation for a lot of things that depend on copper. (sure, eventually it would increase supply too.)
A lot of copper goes to nonelectrical uses that could probably go away.
Whenever I see something mechanical made of bronze or something it always looks like a real waste. New finishes and coatings look pretty good and composites are strong and corrosion resistant, and steel is cheaper.
What a bad take. The US alone effectively created that much money out of thin air during the pandemic. All of the countries combined printed far more.
Doing the same for an energy project that might actually pay back (unlike the covid losses) is far less disruptive.
Finally, the amount of money hidden away in tax havens by the rich is nothing compared to this. Don’t drag down something as important as the climate crisis with some smooth brained class warfare.
People that charge class warfare just don't want anything to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE from the Fed.
It would become a lot less real too. The wealth of people who mostly get it from stock ownership is a complete fiction, driven by the scarcity of shares on the open market. If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding in AMZN shares, the whole company would be worth a lot less. Not due to any sort of magical effect of Jeff Bezos, but due to the market being flooded with supply.
I guess this means if a hypothetical Bill Gates sold off the vast majority of the 45% of Microsoft stock he owned then the company would then be worth a lot less?
It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
By that time, he had sold almost all of MSFT. He was a ~2% owner. That sale was a lot more similar in scale to a hedge fund selling a large block of shares than to Jeff Bezos liquidating his holdings.
B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade".
> B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them.
Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
In 2020, as I understand it, Bill gates sold less than 1% of MSFT on the open market there: his holding went from a bit over 2% to a bit over 1%. He had been steadily selling over the last two decades.
Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's.
When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
Oh yeah, he sold it very, very slowly, over 20 years. The hypothetical I was responding to is suggesting that these billionaires' fortunes be liquidated within a year.
Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
Nobody said it’s a fiction. What is a fiction is pretending the current share price * number of shares is what the value is. That’s completely detached from how the stock market works.
I think too many people equate fiction and lies. Stock prices and market caps are not complete lies (the company is still worth something) but they are fictions. I like to think of fiction as "a lie that tells a truth that cannot be told any other way" (adapted from Albert Camus).
Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.
Well what you stated never happened, so not sure what there is to disprove. It took Gates a significant amount of time to wind down his ownership stake in Microsoft.
I am not sure of that. If all that money ended up in rich people's pocket, never to see the light of day again we won't be having the inflation crisis. The money through various investments is now out in the open, driving up inflation. It is still unequally distributed and that is causing issues. If there was a magical way to distribute that money equally between everyone inflation won't be an issue. Unfortunately magic isn't real.
I don't claim to know the full causes of the current inflation issues, but inflation can also be caused by a reduction in productivity, not just by an increase in money supply.
There needs to be a reduction in productivity while everyone magically staying at the same income levels though to keep demand high.
The rapid increase in just human labor prices seems to indicate that money is making it to people somehow because COVID didn’t kill enough of the labor force to have that kind of effect.
If you used the money to build renewable infrastructure, most of the money would still end up in rich people's pockets, because typically it's rich people who own the means of producing infrastructure.
No it didn’t. If it all just ended up in rich people’s pockets it wouldn’t have caused this kind of inflation and supply shortages for all of these every day items.
No. They won’t be paid back until the government gets an excess of at least that much in tax revenue.
Something mitigating an ongoing can be expensive, have the intended positive effect immediately, but not be paid back for a long time (or sometimes ever).
Federally subsidized flood insurance is a much smaller scale example. There are many places in Florida and the gulf in general where houses get destroyed by hurricanes and have to be rebuild for $X every 20 years when we only collect maybe 25% of $X in premiums.
High taxes always drive capital away into unproductive tax havens.
Reagan's achievement was to eliminate tax shelters in exchange for lower tax rates. This pulled the investment out of those unproductive shelters into productive activities, leading to the prosperity of the 80s.
Prosperity of the 80s? You mean the era that signalled the end of the post-war golden age of capitalism and brought about hyper-financialisation (which led us to the 2008 catastrophe from which we still haven't recovered) and the decline of tax progressiveness and public services (which supercharged wealth inequality back to gilded age levels)?
Many of our current problems can be traced back to changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name. Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go up.
When you deregulate stuff, the catastrophic results usually don't come immediately. If they were to come immediately, it would be blatantly obvious to everyone that it's a bad idea, and hence deregulation wouldn't happen. So, in practice, most of deregulation happens in areas where it's good for short-term and bad/catastrophic for long-term.
Reagan created and governed on unprecedented peacetime deficits caused by his military spending and tax changes. If his policy had any meaningful influence over the economy of the 80s it's likely the massive deficit spending.
That said, the link between presidential policy & short term economic changes is universally overstated. The government can cut down basic research funding and the effects won't be felt for a half century.
My point was his policies caused a shift in investment capital away from unproductive tax shelters and into productive investments. Eliminating the tax shelters was part of the deal he made with Democrats to get the budget passed.
That can't help but produce positive economic changes.
> High taxes always drive capital away into unproductive tax havens.
Citation needed. Show me data that demonstrates that use of tax havens is correlated to tax rates. The data over the last 30-40 years at least at first glance seems to disagree. Tax rates (in particular top income bracket, capital gains and corporate taxes) have continously reduced, while the amount of money in tax havens has increased.
You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.
And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.
Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
Government owned, government built, government run regional monopoly electricity generators in North America are already the absolute cheapest dollars per kilowatt hour in the continent.
It's not communism.
I am referring to hydro quebec, and to the hydroelectric dams in central Washington State.
Would you claim that if we had let the free market build those hydroelectric dams using private capital instead, that we would have better results right now?
All that lost value could have gone to line their pockets, but instead it’s being used for the good of society (to be fair, probably to those same shareholders through different companies at exorbitant rates).
The communists in Norway, like Russia, benefit enormously from pumping oil out of the ground, which goes to the government. In Norway's case, it's 20% of the GDP. Probably much more today with all the oil price increases.
Can you comment on the communists of Quebec? As a Canadian, this is what I find lacking in debate on American sites like Reddit or HN.
Canada is very similar to the United States, another way of saying that is that Canada does things slightly different yet the results seem to be profoundly different than the States.
Why is that, and what are we as Canadians doing that Americans and others around the world should attempt to copy and improve upon?
It isn't, not when there is a better _commercial_ system in the world. If the "invisible hand" was real, great. As it has been a constantly manipulated and managed construct within the world of global finance from the moment Adam Smith shared it with anyone, it completely ceased to have any meaning going forward other than license to savage.
Economics isn't science or maths when you get past the micro level. It is psychology.
If there is a Capitalist society that also has a deep respect for mental health, I say it only exists in Science Fiction from the 50s and 60s.
The goals of communism are pure and true, but insanely unrealistic considering we're talking about humans who still instinctually believe in a reality where scarcity is anything other than a human construct.
On the other hand, naturally, barely restrained capitalism is just going to be a giant cancer where the rich feast off the poor until it all goes down in flames.
What's needed is a shared sense of morality, community and survival across our species.
Show me any large scale infrastructure project that has been realized by private enterprises without massive government subsidies. How is your privately funded highway or rail system working out for you?
> How is your privately funded highway or rail system working out for you?
Well, we get lovely toll gates about every 10 miles. Happily they’ve been automated so you can more or less just cruise on, but the constant “that’ll be $3, that’ll be $4, that’ll be $3.50” while you are driving can get on your nerves.
You mean like china who has 10,000 high speed rails running every day producing the cheapest PV cells and lifted their population out of poverty? Let's just let Elon Musk get richer at the 3 trillion dollar mark he might let us have ONE tunnel.
The notion that government supplied infrastructure, which enables private industry to flourish, is somehow communist, would probably make even Ayn Rand pause for a second. From roads to electricity to clean water, government infrastructure has been part of the American success story since the 18th century.
It's only the radical "right wing" (scare quotes because they bear no resemblance to "right wing" thought from before the 90s) that have challenged the government role in giving American industry the tools they need for success.
To call government funded infrastructure "communist" is the clearest illustration of the Overton Window I think I've ever seen.
I would claim that, yes, private capital would generate power more cheaply with those dams, but that isn't the only reason those dams are there. They serve several alternative functions (ie preventing flooding, keeping lakes full) that a free marketeer would not do.
However, dams are cheap enough for power generation that even with government inefficiency involved in their construction and operation, the power is so cheap that it doesn't matter.
I thought that question got empathically answered when Ontario hydro was privatized and split and went to hell together with our electricity prices.
Same with Ontario vs Manitoba or Quebec car insurance etc. Some things just suck when they're privatized - they focus on short term gain and end up with lousy infra and long term preparedness. I think HN has a pretty solid consensus on private telecom monopolies vs municipal fiber as well.
Back to topic, I thought most of usa private power monopolies are basically in dire straits from infra upkeep and maintenance and grid - there's a lot of bright knowledgeable folks on HN so I would genuinely appreciate comment if I'm way off base in my ignorant ways.
As a limiting case, a private system can't do it cheaper than a public one. A private system needs to skim profits off the top, which will always limit how cheap it can go
Private is not always cheaper — the NHS comes to mind as a counter-example, and is cheaper in part because the British government gets to act as a monopsony.
While competition can indeed help illuminate new solutions, competition can also come in the form of different political parties and international comparisons.
While Texans froze and natural gas-fired power plants tripped offline during a February cold snap, natural gas traders and pipeline companies made up to $11 billion in just nine days.
“I will say we understand that it would be unacceptable to just have customers bear the cost on their monthly bill and as if anybody could pay for that,” Gold-Williams said. “So we are working diligently - the financial services team is working diligently, trying to figure out ways to truly spread that cost, potentially maybe, you know 15 - I mean, 10 years or longer to try to make it affordable. We don’t have that fully assessed.”
I'm Australian and as a nation we're considerably more "communist" than can be found in the US .. with many major public funded infrastructure projects historically established, a global AAA credit rating, a minimum living wage since 1900, national health, functioning democracy, etc.
There are numerous counter examples to your overly broad "never ever" claims here.
France is buying out the remainder of EDF (France’s commercial nuclear fleet operator) for €10 billion, so we’re going to get another chance to observe the experiment.
>Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
1) the empty arid land where we would put 40 million acres of solar panels is for the most part already owned by a state or national level government. go look at a map of how much of nevada is controlled by the BLM for instance.
2) governments already pay for electrical generation through nuclear power plants, building hydroelectric dams, etc. the question would be to apply that same money to building giant ground mount PV instead.
While your house wiring is typically copper, transmission and distribution wiring isn't. That's very-often aluminum. And as you point out, we make a huge amount of the stuff.
20.6 MT copper/year vs 64 MT aluminium/year, even using both that's still equivalent to about 17 years of current global production (which is a big but not impossible change over the timescales desired), but the price is still painful.
Aluminum has higher specific conductivity than copper by mass. So if you think you need 1 MT of copper conductivity, you can do the job with 0.5 MT of aluminum.
Aluminum is also quite abundant. Rate limits will be political rather than production. That's not to say this is a realistic idea or that it's worth doing, just that it isn't unthinkable on a resource basis.
I doubt copper would be used in that kind of thing. It's worse, but not that much worse.
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
A clear majority of utility storage will not be batteries, just because cheaper methods will be favored.
The cheapest will rely on E = Fx, where F is air pressure, or gravity, or buoyancy. But liquified anhydrous ammonia, despite being more costly to make, will be extremely popular because it is easy to transport and store, and is fantastically useful for many purposes.
I think that depends on battery tech. If they get magnesium air or metal free organic flow working I would imagine it would probably be chosen over mechanical methods.
Ideally I suspect you don't really want utility storage anyway, you want something so cheap, small, and renewable you can do point of load storage and have a bit of grid independence, and not need as much transmission infrastructure.
Copper is used in applications where the conductor is volume constrained. Transmission lines are not volume constrained, they are mass constrained. Aluminum is superior there: its electrical conductivity divided by density is higher than copper.
I'm curious if anyone knows the cost/benefit analysis of HVDC over aluminum cables versus using high-temperature superconductors like ReBCO tape. Maybe supply of yttrium is a bottleneck preventing large-scale use of ReBCO?
High voltage solves a lot of materials problems for wires. I assume that almost everything about superconductors is expensive to do, not just the raw materials, which makes it too costly (in both energy and money) to use them as wires.
I assume there's a really high fixed cost involved in creating a cable installation that's insulated and continuously chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures, but maybe there's a break even point if the amount of current you're moving is large enough? I mean, if you're comparing with an aluminum or copper cable with a cross section measured in meters, that isn't cheap either.
There might not be a break-even point. Maybe ReBCO tape is just more expensive per amp it can transport than ordinary conductive metals like aluminum. Maybe HVDC lines can be boosted to arbitrarily high voltages such that you never need huge cables in the first place.
Superconductors get VERY exciting VERY quickly if they ever quench, and that is a property of the current and superconductor. You can't carry infinite current.
They may be more efficient, but they come with a whole host of challenges that make them difficult to use over long distances or in uncontrolled environments, which is pretty much what you'll have to deal with for long distance utility level power transfer.
We don’t need to shift all necessary electricity from one end of the earth to the other right? Just the shortfall that a large number of batteries cannot deal with overnight.
Superconducting power transmission was first implemented back in 2014 [1]. Some progress has been made since then [2].
I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
I like superconductors, and I certainly hope they'll become viable, but "hundreds of miles" is a factor of at least 120 short of what's needed, and land for a GW of PV isn't that expensive even in western Europe, especially as PV can be present in pastureland at the same time as the animals.
Did you take into account that transmission cables are usually hollow? Due to the skin effect, most current runs through the edge of a cable, so by hollowing out the cable you can remove a part that doesn't carry much current.
>> I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.
I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
But it seems they need places with ample sunshine and water to electrolyze. That rules out the American west, the Sahara, etc. If they can use seawater, then arid coastal areas could work.
because shoving all that brine back into the sea in the general area of the desalination plant causes a localized ecological disaster and dead zone of marine life
My point was that maybe we should transport the electricity to where it needs to be used over high voltage long distance lines, rather than running an artificial hydrocarbon fuel generation process, storing it in tanks or pipelines, and then sending it to where it needs to be used, and feeding it into combustion engines.
The article also pointed out that even with future cost reduction from scale etc, some things just don't work well running off electricity, the energy density of hydrocarbons is very hard to beat unless you go nuclear... and for things like planes, baring any massive technological breakthroughs, it's probably gona have to be hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future... so synthesising those fuels by short circuiting the carbon cycle in a post "dig unreplenishable shit up from the ground" era, is pretty attractive.
The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places.
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping.
As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
Moore's law will eventually stop, too. But people have been predicting the end for 50 years and it still looks like it has at least another 10 to go. It seems quite clear that solar costs will continue to drop exponentially until the end of the decade, which is all the author's assumptions need.
Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
Moore's law already stopped - since Intel's 10nm process was delayed by 5 years. The exponential grown continues, but a lot slower than predicted by Moore.
Even that "exponential" growth is a not a thing anymore. There are factors which make it less obvious (growing TDPs of modern CPUs and GPUs; going wider, i.e. increasing the number of CPU cores, instead of faster; making chiplets and building cpus out of them instead of big single dies), but these factors only postpone the inevitable (there's only so many levers you can pull and most of them have already been pulled). We're a couple years away from the silicon limit, the 2nm situation already looks grim.
The article suggested local production, good luck buying land anywhere close to NYC at 100$/acre.
Mores law also failed several times. More revised his initial 1965 estimate for a doubling every year in 1975. He predicted various doubling rates with the weakest form being transistors on a single chip every 2 years starting in 1980.
So, it’s current form isn’t an exponential increase in density but in terms of transistors on a single chip. If density actually doubled every 2 years then starting from 1971 an Intel 4004 @ 188 t/mm then we should have hit 6 million t/mm in 2001 and 197 t/mm in 2011. Except chips only broke 6 million in 2012 (11 years late) and are nowhere near 197 million t/mm in 2022.
You're definitely not going to power all of NYC by rooftop solar, but also look at the size of the warehouse roofs (empty, no solar) in NJ just across the river, and out on long island. And Staten island. Etc.
Empty land is not necessarily a requirement.
Parking lot per-row shade structures that integrate PV panels on top are also a thing now, and there are sure a shitload of parking lots in NJ and out on long island.
Rooftop solar is far more expensive than solar put on land. The cost of rooftop solar (particularly homeowner solar) is usually hidden by implementing a big subsidy to wealthy consumers that is paid for by less wealthy consumers - sort of a reverse robin hood scheme.
We are well past the point where anyone can argue we should subsidize rooftop solar because we need to help build a fledgling industry - yet I see solar advocates continue to advocate for this wealth transfer from the poor to the well off.
Rooftops are unused space, but the land use is generally a small part of the cost. Utility scale solar has real economies of scale compared to one-off small installations on someone's roof.
I'm not from the area, but isn't Manhattan well known for its tall buildings? How would those buildings' shade affect solar panels closer to ground level, e.g. warehouse roofs and parking shade structures?
I don't think I've posted any land cost estimates, elsewhere in this thread I mentioned how many warehouse roofs in NJ, Staten island and long island have no solar on them.
With bulk PV panels by the pallet already at something like $0.42 per STC watt the majority of a residential or small commercial install is already dominated by the cost of labor and other components.
I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
I think the situation is even more extreme than you say.
https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... has €0.43 per watt peak (STC watt) only for high-efficiency panels, the kind you buy when you're tight on space (or the cost of your installation is dominated by the cost of labor, as you say). "Mainstream" is €0.33/Wp and "low cost" is €0.22/Wp.
Also, these costs seem to be much higher as a result of the current supply-chain crisis. The low point so far was August 02020, with high-efficiency panels at €0.30/Wp and low-cost panels at €0.16/Wp. Probably at some point shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even lower than that.
I was basing that off a fairly pessimistic cost of $0.42 USD/STC watt for a single pallet quantity. Going well beyond single pallet quantities the cost drops quite a lot.
I also use sunelec as a general small quantity pricing benchmark, but for the west coast, their prices can be matched from several distributors that ship from California warehouses.
But roof PV makes the grid more resilient, requires less grid, and the owners more independent. A huge portion of consumer electricity could be served with rooftop. It should scale with hot sunny days for A/C surges. It may be key to not overloading the grid with true mass market BEV adoption.
And the article seems to miss that wind is still beating solar from the LCOE charts I've seen. They keep making the towers taller and taller for better economies of scale.
In Europe, roof PV is actually making the grid worse off when residential areas become over-producers. The capacity is not available to move the peak solar power away from residential areas or between residential areas. The grid is apparently designed for top down generation.
I don't think overproduction will be as big an issue once BEVs and cheaper home storage (sodium ion or other means) hit the mainstream.
Reverse metering is basically a shadow subsidy.
And I'm not arguing that the grid doesn't need to be adapted or needs work, but if we have a lot of home generation, then we don't need to worry as much about increasing overall grid capacity to handle BEV home charging.
Do residential peaks coincide with A/C use (daytime, hot weather)? At these times, do you know what portion of energy use by ducted A/C might be covered by a 5-10kW home system?
Our council is currently promoting group buying discounts for solar and/or battery systems, and the state government had been running solar installation rebates/credits for several years.
It should run you about $0.75/W to install them and hook them in for a grid tie system, maybe a hair more. Interestingly, that's the same for roof mount (with rapid shutdown) or ground mount (without rapid shutdown). Costs vary slightly depending on what you're doing in terms of panel orientation and inverter DC:AC ratio (if it's not 1.2 or greater, add more panels).
This project (CO2 to CH4) would benefit from maximum raw production per panel, if you can ramp the plants up and down, so aim them south. I've been deploying, both for my solar and for some other residential projects I'm helping with, east-west facing panels, to get production up as early in the morning as possible and run it late. You get less kWh per panel than south facing, but you get a system that, on a good day, is producing from sunup to sundown, even when those set far north of east/west. Out here, peak days are almost 45 degrees north of E/W for sunrise/sunset.
Iron Ridge XR1000 and some locally welded frames work pretty darn well for this sort of thing, if you have the ground area for it.
A sun tracking ground mount that goes on a steel pole and can take the wind loading of just six 1.65 x 1.0 meter size 60 cell panels costs considerably more to buy, ship and install than the panels themselves. These days if you need more kWh per month your money is much better spent buying more fixed mount panels.
You can - trackers are absolutely a thing, and historically tended to be used a lot. Back when solar was $10/W. Adding even $5/W for tracker structure and equipment was far cheaper than additional solar panels.
Now, with panels sub-$0.50/W, you can accomplish the same thing (more power) for far less money by just putting more panels on. You get less production per nameplate panel watt, but the total system costs are usually lower. And you can push your DC:AC ratios pretty high if you want - cap your inverter out on sunny days, but still get more power on cloudy days. It just depends on what you're trying to optimize for.
I still see trackers on occasion - they're cool. But the only place they're useful is if you have some stiff limit on nameplate capacity. Out here, you're limited to a 25kW system for residential, and you can't exceed your local transformer capacity in panel area - not inverter output (why, I have no idea, I've gotten a range of BS reasons that mostly center around somehow changing the system, blowing up the transformer, and then the power company being on the hook for a new transformer). So if you want to run a large "residential" site (think a ranch or something like that with a bunch of outbuildings), you can hit the 25kW limit quickly, and then need to go to a tracker to increase kWh generated on your 25kW system.
But outside edge cases like that, just put more panels on. The systems I'm helping people with are mostly A-frames, with east-west facing panels for long solar days, and a fairly high DC/AC ratio. I've got 7kW of panel on 6kW of inverter, though I rarely see the inverter past 4500W, which is by design - I don't like pegging out power electronics for long periods of time, and prefer to run things at 80% of design load or lower for longevity reasons.
No, the project here would still benefit from some more evenly spaced production. If they can run their plant at peak just for 4 hours a day instead of, say, 8, it will take much longer to get back the capital investment.
In the US, land is widely available at around $1000/acre. The current cost to cover that with PV is around $100,000/acre (depending on the fill factor).
So, land costs are not a substantial obstacle to reduction in the cost of PV energy.
Land is just an example, running new HV power lines from ultra cheap land to consumers is another cost that’s not dropping.
If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10% annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.
Or, you know, we move industry out to be closer to the PV fields. Globally, energy intensive industry probably moves to places like Chile with very high insolation. Too bad, Europe.
It helps out a bunch that there is a nuclear power plant outside of Phoenix and the Hoover dam in Vegas generating all kinds of carbon-free electricity to power the air conditioning.
That NPP evaporates large amounts of water (obtained from the waste water stream of the area). It would probably be better for Phoenix if it were replaced with non-thermal generation and the water reused for other purposes.
This is wrong. Steel manufacturing happens near ports.
We can't shift cities to electricity generation. We historically choose population centres in places with optimal conditions like having good water flow or natural protection with mountain ranges or good level land.
Most industry needs access to transport with shipping being the cheapest.
A good example is aluminum production in Iceland, which has a disproportionally huge aluminum refining industry (it makes almost as much aluminum as the whole of USA despite having literally 1000 times smaller population) simply due to the availability of cheap energy and access to ocean shipping.
1000 per acre, maybe in the Mojave desert with a parcel size over 1000 acres. Acreage near anything that isn't a ghost town is well into 10-20k per acre. Land has an inherit scarcity. Investment funds and even other countries are buying up US Land quickly. Land is always the problem. Proximity and transition are also a problem.
> Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping.
The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
Rooftop solar is now far more expensive than utility scale solar. As a renter who subsidies this through my electricity bills I don’t understand why I should be subsidising more artisanal scale generation for homeowners at 3x the price of utility scale solar.
That underlies my thought on roof top solar. Big picture we can build out twice as much utility scale solar for the same expenditure of resources. If homeowners are going to spend $$ on something replacing gas furnaces with heat pumps would be better.
Resynchronizing all those installations to the grid without a DC step in between (powerwall basically) will cause a lot of blown fuses in the best case.
I’m vaguely attached to a utility scale deal trying to happen. The land owners are interested, the utility is interested, and there isn’t much around the site. Still the details might kill the deal- they can’t agree where the HV lines will run, the utility wants a bit more land than the owners want to lease, access details and liability concerns are coming up, etc…
Utility scale solar is the future but rooftop solar gets installed NOW because each deal is simpler.
Now why my utility isn’t building out solar fields in the massive amounts of land they own around their coal and oil fired plants…
Maybe you can help steer the project toward a dual use of a reservoir or pasture.
When you don't have to pay rent on land, you don't need to pack the panels cheek by jowl. Pasture doesn't normally generate much revenue, per acre, and it tends to be all at once, so something producing year-round is a welcome buffer. The livestock keep down weeds and benefit from shelter, so are healthier.
On water, the panels are kept cool and therefore both notably more efficient, but also last much longer. Nobody knows yet how much longer. They cut evaporation and biofouling.
Well the author points out with data to back them up that people have incorrectly assumed many times along the way that the exponential trend was about to end, while in fact it's accelerating.
He didn't say that the trend would go forever. He said that he didn't see a reason for them to slow down in the near term, we could still be at the beginning of a sigmoid curve.
While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free.
For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had to be paid for, my guess is it's VERY cheap.
There is absolutely no need to buy land to put solar on. So, land cost may be exactly zero.
Solar coexists synergetically with many other uses, most particularly reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling and runs cooler, thus more efficiently (up to 2x vs desert); and pasture, where it also cuts evaporation, and the livestock can duck under to get out of sun and rain, and keep weeds down; and cropland, where it cuts water and heat stress, often increasing yield. Siting on industrial and warehouse roofing makes roofs last longer.
Agriculturally, bifacial fence-rows running north-south are easiest and cheapest to deploy, and collecting most in morning and afternoon better matches demand curves.
Siting solar panels in deserts will soon be recognized as very stupid. They collect dust and run hot, cutting their output often in half. Siting them in single-use arrays not in desert is almost as bad.
Just now Utah is frantic about the Great Salt Lake drying up and then blanketing the region in toxic dust. Cover it over with solar panels, and it will fill back up.
Here in Australia (where it gets pretty hot) a bunch of places have started putting solar panels over carparks.
They are great because they shade the cars, and often the installation cost is $0 because the installer will sign a X year agreement with the occupier to provide electricity at Y cost for a number of years.
And here in France, local environmental NGOs are starting to prevent any solar project installed on fields (even with the crops still growing underneath), on the ground "officially", that is ruins the countryside view ; and, "innofficiallt", on the grounds that it's corporations that are installing the panels, ergo it's bad.
I would say on the contrary, French people start stuff pretty much at the same rate as everyone else, as long as things are done under the radar. But the moment a topic becomes twitter-fodder, we develop pockets of resistance, and, all clichés aside, "being in a pocket of resistance" is at the earth of French persona. (We still teach kids and conservatives that Asterix and De Gaulle won their wars.)
We had three presidential candidates running on a platform of "windmills are ugly, let's not do that", and at least three on the platform of "nuclear plants are dangerous, let's not do that". I'm kinda worried that "solar panels are ugly, let's not do that" is gaining traction; and I wonder who's going to be the first to oppose dams, but there's a niche.
In California I believe that they're given that a try over a stretch of canals. As long as they are robust to windy weather, and don't interfere with water fowl, then sounds like a win-win.
There are so many parking lots, where cars just bake in the sun, that would benefit from solar parking roofing. Cars would have to cool less, and the landowners would have another steady stream of income (its the upfront costs that are the problem as always).
TBH I look forward to a time where you can pull into a supermarket, shaded by solar panel roof, and I can hook up my EV to charge while I'm pulling groceries from the shelves. (Not that I expect the solar to be able to provide all the power needed for EV charging).
There is no free lunch here. Worker safety, installation costs, maintenance, etc seriously favor installing solar on cheap land rather than as part of mixed use.
It’s not just about people falling off roofs, the kW people can install per hour goes down. Similarly you rarely stick solar trackers on roofs and can’t on simple floating platforms while the majority of grid installs use at least single axis tracking which provides more power in the morning and evening.
Permian Energy Centre is a just completed 460MW project in Texas that uses 1 axis solar trackers. This continues the trend of ~70% of US grid scale installs use single axis tracking, even though it’s a tiny slice of the home market at scale it’s a clear win.
Yes they are more expensive per kWh, but a better match the demand curve means higher profits.
Exsolation might find a use. Big mirrors at L2 to reflect sunlight to solar farms at night? They would need to focus very precisely, from a million miles off.
or b) a potential (though IMO somewhat nutty) geoengineering project to simply reflect a bunch of sunlight back into space before it heats us up.
What you're describing sounds like maybe "resolation"? (Though also sounds like it's increasing the total amount of insolation, and thus would accelerate climate change...it's actually very similar to the soletta mirror designed to do exactly that, described in Lois Bujold's _Komarr_, part of the Vorkosigan space-opera saga.)
Hah, just re-read (or to be precise, re-audiobook-listened) to Komarr last week. I kind of want a side-novel following Auditor Vorthys now... although I imagine he's already something of a time-seasoned Leo Graf.
This kind of energy infrastructure is only build in China at the moment. High voltage DC, solar& battery manufacturing, solar installation, new nuclear plants
At current prices, it's already worth fully solar individually... just expensive up front. Batteries and transmission are so expensive it's worth just installing MOAR solar. Connecting to the grid would be $1k/year so (depending on rate of return) it takes ~20years to pay off, which is right around the warrantee period.
Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.
I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
The article we're commenting on is about a moderately efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are: you manufacture methane in the sunny place and then ship it to where the load is, either through a pipeline, through a liquefaction terminal, or after an additional process step such as hydroxylating it into methanol.
This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
I think it would reduce the reduction in carbon emission by some percentage, but since we're talking about direct air capture rather than point-source capture, it wouldn't limit the reduction in carbon emission.
Methane’s much higher global warming potential (versus carbon dioxide), implies that there’s a threshold of methane leaks above which the warming would be worse than if you did nothing at all.
Doing the math, methane is around 30x worse than CO2.
So say you pulled down 30 units of CO2 and 1 unit of Methane leaked (3%), you’re back to square one. Not to mention the Methane will be burned into CO2 again so this closed cycle isn’t so closed.
This is a good point: you need to get your methane leakage rate below 3% in order for synthetic methane to improve the climate-change situation rather than making it worse. Probably the easiest way to do that is to convert it into a liquid fuel, like methanol as I suggested upthread, kerosene as I suggested in a different comment, or ethanol.
At the point where you are doing enough direct air capture of CO₂ to supply a substantial fraction of the world fuel demand, you're also doing enough direct air capture to capture a substantial fraction of world CO₂ emissions. At that point you can just pump some of it into natural gas fields instead of converting it to CH₄.
> In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity
All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.
If you do the math, you'll see that your worries are misplaced. Because you already would have done it if you knew how, I've done it for you below.
I do think that plastering the world with solar panels would be a real problem, and the logic of living systems suggests that it's a problem we'll have to contend with at some point. There's nothing that inherently limits human energy usage to anything like current human energy usage, so if solar panels are cheap, eventually someone will want to cover the oceans and forests with them.
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However, that will probably not become a problem for more than 50 years. Right now we're only talking about replacing current human energy usage, which is only about 18 terawatts, last I checked, including non-electrical energy. (See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...: 162494 terawatt hours in 02017 = 18.537 TW.) With cheap 16%-efficient solar panels and a nominal solar constant of 1000 W/m², that would nominally be about 120 000 km² of solar panels, half the size of Idaho.
But we have to take into account capacity factors, which range from 10% in extremely polar countries like Germany and the Netherlands, through 29% in California, to even higher in deserts. (I'd be very pleased to have some concrete, trustworthy figures on the capacity factors of real utility-scale PV plants in places like Abu Dhabi or Chile.) So we're talking about 400 000 to 1.2 million km², almost half the size of Kazakhstan. Once you set the panels apart so you can angle them toward the equator without them shadowing each other, we're talking about roughly the entire size of Kazakhstan. But presumably Kazakhstan itself is sunnier than that, so a better intuition pump would be the northernmost 20% of Siberia, the part where the permafrost is melting due to climate change, or all of Alaska. (Siberia is 13.1 million km².)
But I proposed building ten times as much solar panel capacity in cloudy places, not three times as much. And that's because, although the capacity of utility-scale PV farms in places like the Netherlands averages 10% year-round, it's only about 2% in the winter, because it gets cloudy. So, if we were talking about a worst case conservative limit in which the whole world is as bad for PV as the Netherlands, and also failed to store a summer harvest of tasty methane to burn in the winter, we need 6 million km² of solar panels, probably spread over 12 million km², the size of all of Siberia.
If 1 m² of solar panel modules weighs 40 kg (I'm too lazy to look this up right now but it's the right order of magnitude due to the glass and aluminum, even though the actual silicon cells are under 300 grams) we're talking about 240 billion tonnes of solar panels, not just a measly few million.
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So, wait, isn't that a huge problem? Doesn't that end up with a country-sized landfill and plastering the world? At 2.4 g/cc and a typical 10 m landfill depth we're talking about 10000 km², which would be, yes, the size of a small country; Monaco is 2.02 km², Cyprus is 10452 km², and Kuwait is 17818 km².
But probably you'd dig the landfill deeper if you were building such a big one. Or pile it higher and just build an earth berm around it instead of digging. At 164 m deep it would be 606 km², the area of Chicago. Technically Chicago is still the size of a small country because there are about 15 countries smaller than Chicago but I think "small-country-sized" is a misleading description of Chicago. I think "less than half the size of Anson County, Georgia, population 22055" is a more illuminating description of 600 km² than "small-country-sized" or even "Chicago-sized". I hope this doesn't ...
One more question, if you don't mind - how many toxic materials do these panels contain? From what I've read, a typical landfill is designed to be leaktight for a couple centuries at most. After that, whatever heavy metals and other toxins were in the panels can start leaking into the ground and groundwater. It would suck to leave a bunch of poison drips for the future generations.
Basically silicon PV panels (the kind universally used now) are significantly less toxic than table salt and basically nearly else in your house.
The PV cells themselves contain silicon, aluminum, silver, and trace amounts of phosphorus and boron, and now sometimes gallium. Upon exposure to air or water the silicon surface passivates by forming a layer of amorphous silicon dioxide, which protects the silicon from further corrosion even in strong acids and room-temperature strong bases. Amorphous silicon dioxide is also used as an inert filler in pills, an abrasive in toothpaste, and one of the two main ingredients in simethicone, a treatment for gas pains. If you ground up the PV cells finely enough you could add them to your food with no ill effects.
Most of the mass of the panel is glass, which is also mostly amorphous silicon dioxide with small amounts of calcium and sodium oxides. This you could also add to your food in powder form with no ill effects, contrary to urban legends about ground-glass poisoning.
Gluing the PV cells to the glass is normally EVA, poly(ethylene-vinyl acetate). This is the material crafting hot-glue sticks is made from, as well as flip-flops, mouthguards, yoga mats, and those soft foam toys for kids. Less well known is that it's used as an extended-release drug delivery vehicle in implants: the drug slowly leaches out of the plastic inside your body, while the plastic remains unchanged. It has no known adverse effect on human health.
Sealing the back of the modules is a thin layer of, typically, polyvinyl fluoride (tedlar), which is also relatively biologically inert, but not to the same extreme as the rest of the materials. It's commonly used for raincoats and whiteboards. Hydrofluorocarbons tend to be of relatively low toxicity, but it's not thoroughly biocompatible in the same way as its cousin PVDF, or as EVA and silicon. Some panels are instead made with polypropylene or polyethylene terephthalate, which are as extremely nontoxic as the other materials.
The cells' electrical connections are soldered together with solder. Traditionally this was lead and tin, which does leach lead, though very slowly. Nowadays lead-free solder is used, typically consisting of tin and silver. This is another thing you can eat freely, although there might be traces of flux left from soldering.
The frames are normally made of aluminum, which is extremely nontoxic.
So, no heavy metals except tin and silver, which are nontoxic. Except that silver is toxic to bacteria.
There have been some experiments with nickel/copper plating to reduce the amount of (costly) silver used; I'm not sure if these are in production. Although nickel and copper are pretty safe, they're not nearly as astoundingly nontoxic as the other materials listed above. If you eat chunks of copper you will get sick.
Some thin-film panels have been made with more toxic materials like cadmium, selenium, copper, and tellurium, but they have mostly been driven out of the market by silicon PV cells. The total amount of these materials was small, but it's been found that they could leach out in an acid landfill. But they're not present in silicon cells.
So basically everything you have in your house is way more toxic than solar panels. Latex paint? Toxic polymers. Steel knife? Potential for iron poisoning. Concrete? There's substantial trace levels of many heavy metals in the cement, and it's basic enough to burn your skin, plus there are probably superplasticizer additives that are more toxic than anything listed above. Books? Likely still have trace levels of dioxin from bleaching the paper, plus most of the color inks are more toxic than anything in a solar panel. Polyurethane dishwashing sponge? Polyurethane is definitely not a thing you should eat. Foam cushions in furniture? In addition to polyurethane those contain halogenated fire retardants that are suspected of causing mass endocrine disruption. Wood cu...
Even places that are not very sunny get a preposterous amount of sun energy per square meter and solar is in any case to be synergistically combined with wind energy. This is a total non-concern, nobody needs to start building in Libya of all places.
Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of the meat here.
> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."
Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.
> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
I've seen people saying "Alaska shows that nuclear is needed, as wind/solar don't work well there." They don't mention that the average power level on the largest grid in Alaska is just 600 MW. And Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, the northern half of Canada.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances
Rail is indeed appropriate too. In fact better and we should have more of it. But I say no to "special purpose" and thus to transmission lines too. They are ugly and inefficient and we'd need to invest trillions, as these analysts are saying. Just makes no sense when we can instead use rail and road. Invest those trillions in better rail and road. And people in those "high production locales" I'm sure would rather have rail and road than transmission lines.
Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
This is undesirable in the same way shipping water via trucks is a lot less efficient than using pipes.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
For places and times without sun there are other solutions such as natural gas. We are not trying to entirely eliminate all uses of fossil fuels for energy; just reduce them drastically where practical. There is also nuclear (longer time scale), hydro, wind, batteries, and transmission lines, among others.
You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
>The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe
It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.
This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km, comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each, and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them, that's 2e5 truck loads.
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
We wouldn't want to import all our electricity from one country anyway, even if that country wasn't quite as unstable as Libya.
A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.
What would be the point? Even getting 5% of our power from desert solar would be astronomically expensive, and a logistical and political problem of historic proportions. All for a tiny fraction of our power usage. Just build nuclear!
Find me a comparable DC link (5GW * 100, 3000k+ miles). To overcome I^2 losses, a DC system would need an even higher voltage, and we're already talking about a 1000kv AC system.
This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here.
I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.
Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
Germany cancelled projects in Africa with HVDC cables up-continent when solar panel cost dropped to the point that they can just buy enough local panels to meet power needs.
Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
>a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables
I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)
20gwh is a nice start of course but like the solar growth is impressive, battery production capacity growth is also impressive. And of course there are many other forms of storage. I'm bringing this up because people seem to worry about intermittency of solar and wind without realizing just how much battery capacity there actually will be in a few years.
I think we can safely expect some records to be broken on the battery storage front in the next few years. Think orders of magnitude here. About three or so in terms of storage capacity. A a couple of thousand x what we have today.
Basically, the likes of Tesla and other manufacturers are really ramping up battery production in the next few years. If you assume EVs have 50kwh batteries (nice number to work with), 2 million cars would have 100,000,000 kwh of battery. Or 100 gwh, or 0.1 twh. That's what they are shooting for end of this year as a production volume. Tesla is aiming for 10-20 million cars per year longer term and the total market is something like 100m vehicles, give or take. 20 million cars is 1 twh. So, we'll be churning out ~5 twh of battery per year; just for cars. Eventually there will be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road. That's an enormous amount of batteries. And of course there will be other vehicles, dedicated grid storage solutions, etc.
Total installed battery capacity world wide will soon hit tens of twh. To give you an idea of just how much that is, annual energy production globally is in the order of 25 peta watt hours (25000 twh). Or about 70twh per day.
The volume of EVs on the road in a few decades will have enough battery capacity to provide that for several days. And of course a lot of car batteries get a second life in the form of grid storage before they eventually get recycled. Car batteries are good for a few thousand cycles. So, for people worrying about durability, once we have tens of twh of batteries, they might be used for decades to power the world before they need replacing. And we'll use solar and other cheap energy sources to keep them topped up.
There is another such project going on now, to connect Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector. Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this stage).
One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy. Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to mention that countries want to be energy independent, which would be another improvement to the situation we are currently in.
Making wars unprofitable doesn't prevent all wars. That approach is stupid.
However, making war less costly (for the victor) could well cause more wars. I believe that before WW I many a war of conquest was initiated by states hoping to profit. WW I was thought by many states as another great chance to profit, but it turned out that mechanization of logistics, and artillery, meant the toll of war was much lower.
Besides, the 'ospolitik' was more about building relationships and mutual respect than an attempt to affect the cost-revenue analysis of war.
> The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
Solar fans really want to cover entire countries in panels, instead of just building nuclear power
"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.
We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up
Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.
In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.
We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the phenomenon of “curtailment” where we can’t use solar power when and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array, a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.
tbh i just skip solar panels. it's such a grind. by the time i can make them at scale, i need so many of them, and i hate placing them. even with pretty OP construction bots it's not worth the effort IMO.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Solar power in Factorio pairs really well with spidertron. You can give it a bunch of bots, and an automated production line and it just builds itself. The only hard part is to make sure to always keep power growing rather than only expanding when you need more power.
Real life will probably move on from panels, too. PV will be made on big rolls of plastic film (like mylar or kapton), laid out on the ground. Think 3 meters wide by a kilometre long.
I get sabatier and electrolysis but what is a CO2 concentrator? Or rather how does it work? I thought that was the expensive and relatively unknown part of the process.
You may not like the 850°C operational temperature at home.
But the cold part of the cycle, that actually concentrates the CO2 is fun to do at lab-scale, you just have to buy the CaO (and prepare for it becoming very hot).
That is pure fossil industry propaganda. There is no cadmium in ordinary terrestrial solar panels. The lead, if it’s there at all, is in the solder and easily recovered by a pass through a 300-degree intake process. All of the solar panels installed in California, ever, would easily fit in the parking lot of Dodgers stadium, stacked to a reasonable height. They are non-toxic, insoluble bulk crystalline materials.
"This story has been edited to clarify that panels containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily used in utility-grade applications."
That's slightly better but they should never have printed it. Imagine writing such a story about the tiny amount of lead in a million solar panels without mentioning that every car battery sold in California comes with more lead than 2000 solar panels combined.
Edited to add: """…Current CdTe panels contain approximately 6 g/m2, resulting in cadmium emissions of 0.5g/GWh, equivalent to that of a coal fired power plant. The majority of these emissions (77%) result from mining and utilization of the modules, therefore a comprehensive collection and recycling program would not reduce the environmental impacts of these panels. """ -- Brookhaven National Lab
So there you go. Even if you take all retired utility-grade thin-film PV panels, grind them to a fine powder, and scatter them in the biosphere, you still emit less Cd than a coal-fired power station.
This is the same level of logic used against nuclear power, yes if we'd invested in this in the 80s and 90s (even the 00s) we wouldn't be having these conversations and Russia wouldn't be an energy superpower... I feel like a certain amount of "what's going with people" because I'm having to grow up with these decisions not embrace living through the era that made them...
The more important point is that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily not used at all. The PVXchange pricing page stopped quoting prices for thin-film panels years ago because silicon panels are now totally dominant in the market.
90% of a solar panel is recyclable. However, it's only necessary to do so once the panel is no longer economically viable, and panels are generally warrantied to produce 80%+ of their nameplate capacity after 20+ years.
In the EU and elsewhere there's a healthy market in used panels; when a large scale installation upgrades to newer/better panels, the used panels go on the market and end up in places where people don't care about the efficiency per area.
> "Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas."
Terraform Industries has a process for converting atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons (particularly "natural" gas), at the cost of a huge amount of electricity.
Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper.
The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power, which would be good for the planet and people in general (and unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).
Thank you, that is what I gathered, give or take. I guess I was just taken aback by the idea that instead of displacing natural gas we would use more energy to make natural gas. Seems like the ultra-gargantuan investments needed for this kind of transition would be better spent transitioning to a mostly-electric energy economy.
If you're a central planning committee trying to solve for the best outcome under physical constraints, nothing beats nuclear power and railroads.
If you're living in an economic system where investment is primarily determined by rate of profit, then you need to identify a solution where everyone involved is making more money than they would be without you. So it's very important they're competing with oil on economic terms while increasing demand for solar.
Maybe if natural gas was in short supply I could understand their angle. But it isn't, so I don't. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. Meanwhile, global warming, the paramount problem, needs fast solutions, not elaborate stopgap workarounds.
Remind me, western europe, that is the place where offshore wind is way cheaper than natural gas and other alternatives but where the political and economic system seems to be completely unable to connect investments with rational policy goals (survival, independence) and needs of the population (maintaining core temperature within non-lethal ranges, etc.)? :)
So I mean, I assume the original point is about supply/demand, but supply of gas is already short, prices are already high, alternatives are already cheaper, and yet our system is still failing to take any action that might lead to a survivable outcome. So the supply/demand thing seems like a completely meaningless tangent at this point??
You're missing the part where this would displace fossil fuels with "electrofuels", meaning for every ton of this stuff made, that's more fossil fuels left in the ground. Replacing a fossil fuel with a carbon neutral fuel means a reduction in net carbon emissions.
The other part you're missing is that this decouples fuel production from locations with large fossil fuel sources (often run by governments with authoritarian rulers who use their exports as leverage). This means that you can spread production to anywhere the sun shines which means highly decentralized, local production of electrofuels.
The third part you're missing is how this increases demand for solar panels and carbon sequestration technology which has an amazing feedback loop that makes these cheaper and more efficient over the decades, meaning that as hydrocarbon demand declines over time as other technologies take over (e.g., electric cars reducing demand from the transportation sector), this built up intellectual capital and infrastructure can be used to just sequester carbon for long-term storage, which would be net negative instead of just carbon neutral.
There's probably more you're missing but I'd just recommend reading more of the blog where he explains everything.
In the long term, complete displacement of hydrocarbons from the economy is probably the end goal. However, we are nowhere near being able to do that right now. Obviously for the billions of vehicles on the road and the current grid power generation we need not just solar/wind generation, but also massive amounts of grid storage (or massive increases in nuclear) and vehicle batteries. But in industry there are tons of chemical processes that also require hydrocarbons that we haven’t found suitable replacements for yet.
Because it’s not clear how fast we can get absolutely massive amounts of grid storage or nuclear deployed, finding ways to make effectively carbon-neutral natural gas/petroleum is a good step in the right direction, where we can continue to use some hydrocarbons without a net increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and oceans.
It’s also not clear if we will be able to replace all of our current petroleum reliant industrial processes with non-carbonized alternatives, and in those cases, this will be the absolute best case for us.
No, I think we are quite near to being able to achieve that.
There may be billions of vehicles on the road, but as soon as the system fails to be able to upkeep all the deployed capital required to maintain them in operating condition (road resurfacing, parts manufacture, refinement and transportation of fuel, maintaining the value of currency in order to motivate the workers to participate in all of the necessary steps, security from hostilities, roads not being flooded/melted, and so on). In such eventualities sizeable portions of the fleet may be rendered inoperable quite quickly and cars will be displaced, out of necessity, by walking.
What you're making is a different point, it's not that we can't displace hydrocarbons, it's that we can't displace them with something equivalent-or-better. We can probably displace cars with walking, concrete structures with ad-hoc shelters, and hospitals with prayer. That is all not just very achievable, but has actually been increasing in inevitability during our prior decades of "inaction" (obviously you can't really call it inaction when we're taking positives steps to hasten these outcomes)
Methane has some significant advantages over electricity: it's storable over time and can be used to fuel vehicles. About a third of the vehicles in this country are methane-fueled, in fact. A CNG tank is a hell of a lot cheaper than a car-sized lithium battery. If you go further and make the methane into kerosene you can fly airplanes with it. Airplanes can't fly while they're plugged into the grid.
Looks like hopium peddling around their new invention which will solve climate change (spoiler alert: it absolutely won't) and generate limitless energy at the same time (spoiler alert: we have effectively limitless energy in the form of fossil fuels, and even if you ignore climate change, we have already used it to basically destroy our own future by treating the earth as a garbage dump / shithole to be asset stripped of everything of worth to convert it into worthless landfill while basic human needs are still unmet).
Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
If energy production is increasing exponentially, an astronomical demand very quickly becomes manageable and then trivial
The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi
A monoculture of generation and distribution technologies is not a desirable outcome from an engineering perspective. Your goal shouldn't be to put PV everywhere and then just "solve the distribution problem." You're almost certainly going to make things worse that way.
Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function.
It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.
It sounds like you didn't read the article. They aren't talking about putting solar panels everywhere, they're talking about using massive amounts of solar panel in a specific location and use the energy to convert the CO2 in the air into methane.
That and nobody has ever suggested that we rely solely on solar for energy needs. Wind, for example, is cheaper than solar (though solar is catching up.)
Could you be more specific? Because battery energy storage barely works for houses and you can't build pump storage everywhere. Then there are few prototypes like Power-To-Gas which has promising prospect and rest is in level of sci-fi
These are old talking points. Solar plants with gigawatts of storage are being built right now, today. Costs for such large scale storage are dropping quickly and are estimated to cost half of what they do today in 2030. Nuclear proponents need to update their material with the times. They keep insisting that nuclear is "The Only Way" meanwhile, in reality, we're building renewables backed by storage at higher rates than ever before. Solar plus storage is cheaper and faster to build TODAY than nuclear has ever been.
Power to gas, as you mention, would be sufficient. There are also some interesting battery chemistries in the pipeline, like iron-air batteries. How about we keep building renewables at a rapid pace until we actually have enough to need storage? Until then we have time to improve storage technology and build some electrolyzers (we'll need lots of Hydrogen anyway for industrial purposes).
What's the risk? It's not like we run out of wind and sunshine anytime soon. Please don't answer that sometimes neither the sun shines nor the wind blows, because we already know that we'll need storage for a carbon free system.
This is such an odd way to address an argument. From the article:
"Substituting solar power into our electrical grid and atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons into our fuel supply chain is just the beginning. We want to support a future of abundance and wealth, while avoiding starvation even as legacy climate damage shifts rainfall patterns and causes extreme weather."
Seems pretty one-track to me.
Also, there are no manufacturing processes with infinite scalability. And the article fails to make clear their large scale intentions. They go back and forth between some Sarahan style plant, and the total amount of PV available and the current planned excess power due to this and never offer a solid plan as far as I can tell.
Aside from that.. it's a back of the envelope analysis that just projects trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for emergent phenomenon due to the massive market swings it projects.
> it's a back of the envelope analysis that just projects trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for emergent phenomenon due to the massive market swings it projects.
seems like there's a lot of this going around recently
If we forget about where the power is coming from for the moment, wasn't the US Navy experimenting with fuel synthesis? Did that go anywhere?
A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer.
There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details.
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
I suspect those weren't included in the studies because they aren't grid scale yet.
Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world" stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly, so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the grid for one hour).
For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities. And we still don't have enough storage to replace nonrenewables with solar.
Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to replace nonrenewable generation.
But it is a promising technology. If many are built quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten or twenty years.
1: According to the US Energy Information administration, the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.
2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy storage capacity of 553 GWh
accounted for 93% of utility-scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."
You can easily run a grid on 60% renewables with essentially no storage at all. We have a long way to go before 60% of the world's primary power consumption is switched to renewables.
I see we're not discussing the same thing. I was talking about the cost of solar and storage, Germany uses more wind and a lot of biomass and hydro.
But I'm happy to discuss this too. That 50% figure is a peak (achieved when conditions were favorable) and ignores imported electricity.
According to [1], renewables accounted for 41% of power production in Germany in 2021, but only 16.1% of primary energy consumption.
AIUI, that difference comes from (a) imports and (b) the fact that primary energy consumption also includes heating and transport, two sectors that often aren't directly powered by electricity yet, but which must be before an economy can stop consuming non-renewable energy.
Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad idea.
But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air. There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions of years ago that's creating the excess.
Capturing CO2 is not ‘energy cheap’ and therefore it is best when and where possible much of what we start capturing to rid it from the carbon cycle rather than re-introduce it.
Your questions are loaded. You're doing the religious person thing of "Well you don't believe in Jesus, so what do you believe in?" Just because I don't believe synthetic hydrocarbons are a good idea doesn't mean I have to have a replacement.
Synthetic hydrocarbons may be the stepping stone civilisation needs, until a better way of storing renewable energy at grid scale is invented. If you don't like them for unspecified reasons, and don't propose a viable alternative, you're not contributing to the debate.
I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
While desalination requires disposing of all the waterborne particulate, the water can sometimes be precious enough that we bear it. I heard a radio report yesterday [0] about how investing in desalination helped mitigate USA CA Catalina Island's direly depleted resivoir. That's not to say that brine treatment or disposal isn't costly, more that - so long as people are committed to living in dry areas and can afford to, they will pressure their local governments to keep the area habitable.
This comes up a lot when desalination is mentioned. Think of the pacific as a bucket of water. And desalinating all the water we ever need adds up to tiny fraction of a drop of water in comparison. Now the brine is an even tinier fraction of that drop that goes back in the bucket. What does it do to ppm counts of things like salt? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill my house’s tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that something that would be technically feasible today?
Hydrogen can be stored underground (and is), just like natural gas. This is much cheaper per unit energy storage capacity than storing energy in batteries.
there is a short term battery based storage but the long term storage for the winter months is the h2 storage. I think the system is very expensive but a cool prove of concept and for sure a step in the right direction.
Do you have an idea of how much that system costs? I mean if you could pay 100k once and be free of all energy bills for the lifetime of the house/the system it could be quite a value proposition. May Putin, OPEC and the government do what they want - you just do your own power and heat, with no more middlemen.
AFAIK H2 is way more difficult to contain than natural gas, as the molecules are so tiny. Very hard to build a container that doesn't continuously leak the gas.
Hydrogen has been stored underground in multiple places. This is not some speculative technology, it actually exists. The problem you describe is not a blocker. Granted, underground storage is at a larger scale than for an individual. Storing hydrogen in your home is probably not a good idea. Storing thermal energy underground, on the other hand, could make sense for seasonal storage. Ground source heat pumps essentially do that.
Why convert to gas for heating later when you can just store heat itself?*
There was an article/discussion here recently about heat batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement at scale.
In the residential context, the magic word here is "ground source heat pump". A really big coolant loop that stores heat underground. Depending on the jurisdiction and loop size, figure it will cost $15,000+
Storing heat for months requires really, really good insulation, and insulating many small stores is far more expensive than insulating one big store (essentially a square-cube thing).
So this kind of thing may only be viable for industrial processes.
I wonder: Why is sand better than the dirt that’s already on site? Dirt, after all, contains water, which I believe should have an even higher thermal capacity, or not?
Also: How about combining this approach with a heat pump instead of resistive heating?
Another use of natural gas is to make fertilizer. Maybe you'd use a different process though if your end goal is to make ammonia? (I'm not an expert, but it seems you'd use electrolyzed hydrogen either way, but Haber Bosch reacts with nitrogen instead of CO2.)
Why don’t we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point that we can store enough energy for everyone
Regulated one to be too expensive, subsidized the other to be cheap.
The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of education, and three small scope issues that range from unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made nuclear too expensive to be viable.
The arguments against nuclear are based on long history of economic failure. The same tired excuses are always trotted out. It's all someone else's fault.
Money talks, shit walks. The captains of industry and finance are treating nuclear like the failure it is. No money for this money pit.
In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a closed system requires net energy input across the system boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy input than smaller increases of concentration.
Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high.
For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
>Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).
At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.
It's curious that you didn't actually include the calculation of what the minimum energy requirement; instead, you just assert without evidence that it is "very, very, very high".
In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?
Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
> Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
But it certainly can: by capturing on a point source that burns biological fuel. Without the burning, all the CO2 emitted (or captured) would have cycled back to the air a short time later anyways. And if you mainly do it to have a cheap carbon source to make some intermittent energy source you already have storable/transportable (e.g. creating aircraft fuel), just about any low grade biomass will do. Grass. Leaves. Dried algae. Paper too dirty for recycling (or rather: any paper - does paper recycling even make any sense in an economy that also burns wood for energy?). When you start looking at incineration not as disposal and/or energy source, but as a source of concentrated CO2, almost anything turns into a useful resource. All that stuff contains carbon, and it's all going back into the atmosphere one way or another.
Point source capture is pointless: We need the capacity to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Capturing every molecule of CO2 emitted at its source wouldn’t solve global warming.
True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day by using a daily thermal store.
Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.
The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.
Maybe, we'll see. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't seem to agree with you, even though the capacity factor of PV in the PRC is absolutely abysmal.
The figures I've seen suggest that the capex cost of a coal power plant — which is basically a nuclear power plant without the nuclear reactor — is high enough to be uncompetitive with PV in most of the world now, even if the coal were free. So I'm skeptical that GE or CGN has found a way to make their nuclear power plants as cheap as PV, except in, like, Manchuria or Svalbard or something.
Thank you for linking this article! It answers a lot of questions I'd had after reading some poorer coverage of this initiative last year.
I'm definitely not talking about LCOE; I'm just talking about up-front capex. Conceivably nuclear plants could be cheaper to build than PV farms, but still have a worse LCOE, but I don't think they're even cheaper to build. Even for China, which is the best in the world at building things.
This article says the PRC plans to build another 147 GW for a total of 200 GW by 02035, over 14 years, averaging 10 GW per year. Total PRC marketed energy consumption is on the order of 6 TW (6000 GW), though I'm extrapolating that from a figure of 28 PWh/year in 02010 and an increase in energy consumption of 90% since then, and I'd be delighted to have more reliable data.
So the plan is to add an additional 2% to their energy supply (assuming capacity factor 90%) in the form of nuclear — over the course of 14 years, during which time their total energy consumption will presumably roughly double.
In that context this doesn't seem like a huge bet on nuclear to me.
The article says, "China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt." That's roughly six times the cost of PV plants—barely competitive with PV in polar and cloudy regions where PV capacity factors are 10-15%, completely unviable in sunny regions where PV capacity factors approach 30%.
I don't have figures yet for 02021 (do you?) but in 02020, looking only at electric power generation, they installed 48.2 GW(p) of new solar, 71.7 GW(p) of new wind, and 38.4 GW(e) of new coal. If the capacity factors are average for the energy source, that would be 6.3 GW(mean) of new solar, 16 GW(mean) of new wind, and 19.2 GW(mean) of new coal, and yes, PRC's average coal capacity factor really is reported to be just 50%. Solar and wind have been rising much faster.
So that's the context in which I'm saying the CPC doesn't seem to think nuclear power is economically competitive with renewables. It's already installing more renewables than nuclear, even after derating for the different capacity factors and including these future nuclear plans, which may fail to materialize, and it has been for years.
But how do you consider "full system costs" for something that needs people to manage the waste for 1000+ years even after you have closed the plant?
We can evidently not even predict inflation correctly from one month to the next so it seems unlikely that we can know what a nuclear plant actually costs.
France has certainly not known, they're currently over 40 billion dollars in debt for their plants (to be paid by taxpayers when they nationalize the operator), and they have over a million cubic meters of waste that needs manpower to manage for longer than France has existed as a nation.
Instead of nuclear plants in 0.1% of the Sahara, I propose solar panels on 10% of existing parking lots. Much easier, much faster, much cheaper, and coming generations will thank us instead of curse us. :)
It's debatable, but at least everyone† agrees that solar panels don't impose major additional costs after initial construction. So I think we can come to less debatable conclusions by noting that the fairly knowable initial construction cost of nuclear power plants is higher than that of utility-scale solar plants, per watt, in most of the world. That way we don't need to argue about how long we have to hire guards for the million cubic meters of slightly contaminated gloves and concrete—even if that cost is zero, nuclear still loses, except in places like Norway.
By the way, France has existed as a nation for about 1700–1800 years. Maybe you mean "longer than France has existed as a state."
______
† There are a few coal-industry shills raising alarms about cadmium, but of course the currently popular kinds of solar panel contain no cadmium, and even the ones that did contain cadmium didn't pose a real problem because of the minuscule quantities and their resistance to corrosion.
And my 11 year old daughter says that Jeff Bezos could solve world hunger if he just gave away part of his fortune. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way.
This article seems rather hand-wavy. I would have liked to seen more about what the physical and economic limits might be. In particular, how the cost of the solar panels themselves compare with all the other costs needed to get a working plant.
Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01 per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters, electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system) accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11. The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the stacked bar chart, but below $0.02.
Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are already companies working on automating additional elements of solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here:
The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.
Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.
Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?
Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.
The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.
I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.
It's downvoted because its a broad populist statement that isn't actionable in that form and doesn't provide any value to the discussion. In contrast your take is a lot more nuanced and something that actually can serve as a basis for fruitful discussion.
Banning advertisment outright is about as realistic as banning humans from communicating.
That's fine, but pointing that out, like you did now and providing a cogent reply like I tried to almost always leads to interesting discussions, I've found. The trolls run away at the first sight of real discussion anyway, most of the time.
> Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure.
Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
> Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person
> Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.
You have it backwards. Solar panels are a fungible commodity good with no differentiation besides quality and cost. The financial incentive points strongly in the direction of longevity.
> Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
> The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem
Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?
If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
If we were already in a mass extinction event then we should stop all forms of conservation biology and redirect that energy towards entertainment.
A mass extinction event isn't a line of dominos toppling over, but can be stopped. A mass extinction event is something that has started that can't be stopped.
Luckily, the conservation studies continue, because they understand we haven't entered into an actual mass extinction event. We've simply used it as a tool to drum up necessary attention and funding for preservation before we actually find ourselves in one.
> Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.
I appreciate this all-too-rare take. It concerns me that it's so popular to be negative. I believe a lot more good can come about with a positive attitude -- honest and critical at times, yes, but at some point you just gotta put your boots on and get to work.
> Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
So, the good news is that we can generate all the power we will ever need from the sun using cheap solar panels that will last a very long time.
You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.
Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.
Can someone point me to a “loss of performance” type formula for solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90° and “sunshine strength” as the sun rises and dips in the sky?
It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big barrier is political.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
Make financial sense to whom? If solar is cheaper than natural gas, how does a utility profit from charging less? They are highly regulated, and are usually allowed to take a percentage as profit. So it's in their interest to take the more expensive option, depending on regulations
Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past five years of cost data.
In the US, the rare instances of more open markets for electricity generation markets, like ERCOT, and seeing wind/solar/storage dominate over natural gas in new deployments.
This wouldn't happen unless they actually were cheaper.
However, regulated monopolies in other parts of the country have no incentive to innovate or use newer technology. Thus they make their five year plans (usually called IRPs) with opaque financial models with out-of-date costs, leading to bad decision making.
>How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
Maybe a different way to ask the same sort of question is: What would the auto industry look like now if the political climate had been more favorable towards electric vehicles?
841 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 416 ms ] threadExcess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.
Do you have any uses for the plant, or does it create interesting byproducts for you? Photosynthesis is not very efficient, but it is great at making complex organic molecules like sugar or cellulose.
But a plant needs more than power. It needs nutrients, usually in the form of fertilizer.
They also don't generally make hydrogen, not directly at least.
For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.
https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”
https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...
Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx
Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.
Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.
Our regulators rubber stamp every tariff plan the company puts forth, and lets them get a larger profit margin on capex vs opex. So of course the optimal strategy is to run all equipment to failure and replace it with maximally expensive everything as frequently as possible.
Torching the state is the business plan.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
Edit:
$385.06/1033kW = $0.37/kWh
A couple of servers really screws over the electric bill.
Maybe keep the grid link attached to a meter and 100A panel hooked up to nothing if needed for municipal compliance reasons.
I don't have a great explanation for why it isn't happening faster, but I predict a substantial exodus from the California grid. Especially so in places with gas bans or among folks who electrify of their own accord.
But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling it at $200 mwh six hours later.
Sounds pretty wild but apparently scales up very well thanks the to square cube law.
[0] - https://news.mit.edu/2018/liquid-silicon-store-renewable-ene...
Very inefficient compared to heat pumps or even peltiers for that matter.
> store heat in tanks
Oh I already do something similar at home for sub-ambient cooling but I wouldn’t call it cheap.
> If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low
IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...
> IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”
The premise of the article is that the $/Wh cost from PV will become extremely low, faster than most people think. Do you have a reason to believe this is inaccurate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin
creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has ecological costs
in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the percentage of electricity right now that is generated using gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.
Perhaps we can use the Salton Sea? It is at least acknowledged as a truly destroyed ecosystem.
I am less and less sympathetic to groups standing in the way of clean energy production because of any aesthetics issue.
However, I don't live there so I won't judge, though a wind farm got knocked back near where I live because it'd look like a windfarm and it was the greenies who knocked it back.
Solar will coexist with agricultural land and existing reservoirs, and benefit both.
This is how much of downtown Tulsa, OK is covered in parking lots:
https://i.redd.it/ukzcn1xx6cc91.jpg
There is no technological problem to covering a parking lot in PV, it's a question of the political will and money to do it.
If land was truly scarce, parking lot solar would be a good option but I expect most installations will use the cheaper option of just building solar farms a long ways away from people.
Solar parking lots also might make sense in situations where all the power is being used on-site, and it's cheaper in the long run than buying power from the local utility.
You can also see what looks like a regulation size baseball diamond to the top right side.
Add to that urban freeways with enormous junctions ringing this supposedly dense core, cutting off surrounding areas from car-free access.
Yes, the city center has some tall buildings. The car is still dominant on its streets though.
Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
Curious if you're basing this on firsthand knowledge? I know nothing about solar panels but I've read some stories[0][1] lately about difficulties recycling them, particularly older ones that were deployed 10-20 years ago and are now reaching EOL.
[0] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-was... [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-...
https://www.firstsolar.com/modules/recycling
https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/prs_agenda/2_krueger_ieee-prese...
https://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-Solar/Sustainabilit...
German company Flaxres recently completed a pilot scale trial for recycling silicon photovoltaic modules from any manufacturer:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/22/industrial-process-fo...
> ABC (Australia) RURAL [π]
> Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels
> Sheep grazing under solar panels at farms in NSW's Central West have produced better wool and more of it in the four years since the projects began, according to growers.
> Local graziers have labelled the set-up a "complete win-win", with the sheep helping to keep grass and weeds down so as not to obscure the panels.
> In turn, the panels provided shade for the sheep and grass, and helped prevent the soil from drying out.
[π] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
There are various possible configurations of panels that still allow farm machinery to access the crop beneath, and the crop itself is protected from heat stress, wind, heavy rain, and hail. Shading reduces evaporative water loss, lessening the need for irrigation, and the crop has a local cooling effect for the PV panels, which improves their efficiency.
According to an extended report from the Fraunhofer Institute [2], the main challenges are regulatory – at least in Germany, but I imagine similar hurdles in the rest of the EU. Essentially, difficulties obtaining building permits; negation of farming subsidies from enclosure of land; and obstacles to connecting to the grid and receiving feed-in tariffs.
Those challenges all seem surmountable, and there’s surely huge promise in the vast amount of land that would be unlocked for energy generation, never mind the synergies favorable for horticulture in particular.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/key-topics/integrated-photo...
[2]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
I do wonder how robust these would be to wind storms/tornadoes/hurricanes (like we tend to get in the US).
No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
Two points about that:
- existing energy sources already do a huge amount of damage to land (and in places like West Virginia, particularly environmentally sensitive land)
- that's land that can already be converted to solar without significant harm being done (the harm has already been done)
[1]: https://www.gem.wiki/The_footprint_of_coal
Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir or something if you need energy storage, not drive a complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store in a tank and burn in an engine.
either the political will or budget to do this apparently does not exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening. That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a flight, making flying more competitive for shorter distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll most likely be for shorter flights at first (since battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact, and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new tracks).
Same reason why a 2 bed in SF is so absurdly priced.
Higher taxes on land will reduce its value - making land purchases cheaper. This will bring American HSR costs more in line with China's.
China also reduces land acquisition costs by building a lot of elevated HSR and reduces overall HSR costs through economies of scale - something that doesnt work when you limit HSR to one area.
Might be able to run off biodiesel or similar. Even if biofuel is double the cost of current dino juice, fuel makes up 20-40% of major airline’s opex, so it’s not like crude-free flying will kill the industry.
Might even be made up with increased aircraft efficiency, more intermediate stop operations (saving 15-30% in fuel by flying 2x medium haul instead of 1x long haul) and better load factors (“revenue management”).
And one order of magnitude is more than enough. But yeah, besides planes and rockets, hydrocarbons are important in several industrial processes. Besides, we don't want to replace all of the cars, trucks and ships in a single decade.
The hydrogen will be electrolysed from water and liquified right at the airport, from power delivered by HVDC lines.
I expect the LH2 tankage will be in under-wing nacelles alongside the engines. Probably existing airframes can be retrofitted.
Chemical energy storage is simple, scalable, and allows for the easy movement of vast amounts of energy over great distances to be used anywhere with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.
Chemical storage is horrific. Creating diesel and burning it in a turbine or similar you start at 40-50% for the burning phase, without even converting anything in the first place.
If you go the fuel cell route you tend to end up somewhere at 40-60% efficiency.
So no, the only use case for chemical storage is either where you want energy density. Say aviation or maritime shipping. Or nation state like energy security, where you can pay the efficiency price.
For all other use cases any optimization done, or better usage of the energy, will eat into that horrific round trip efficiency.
Similarly, how bound are you to the local topology? The longest already existing HVDC line in China is 3,293 km (2,046 miles). That brings you from the Rockies to any location within continental US.
Utilize renewables to have bidirectional flow compared to traditional hydro.
And the infrastructure used to sequester carbon from the air can be turned around and deployed later when we want to sequester carbon without creating hydrocarbons.
I commented in this way because the article directly addressed the problems with the GP comment, and the GP comment made no mention of it. There's also a pattern on HN and elsewhere of comments popping up in top-level threads made in bad faith to derail and redirect conversation, especially on anything related to power generation or renewables. Telling someone to "address the actual content" is precisely what I was doing.
Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?
Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.
not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
Also: heat and dusty environments are really bad for efficiency. Better with a place where it rains once in a while.
Today at 13:00 more than 38% of electricy in Germany was produced by solar panels! https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
If you open a high res aerial view of any random french or german city right now and look at the roofs of how many warehouses and huge structures are presently covered in PV, versus how many could be covered in PV if we really wanted to, for instance.
But the world is rather focused on war. Now in the ukraine, but taiwan is building up. I mean, a nuclear holocaust would also reduce CO2 emissions, but seriously, it is so frustrating that there are technological solutions to real problems, but they are just not seriously implemented. We could, but we don't. At least not on a global scale.
This sounds like ⓐ a plausible reason for the Libyan government to refuse any such project; ⓑ a good reason for the Spanish and French to ally with the Libyan government (puppet or otherwise) against the Germans and Italians, or the Germans and Spanish to ally with them against the Italians and French, or whatever; ⓒ unstable after a few decades, when Europe's own military forces are no longer overwhelmingly larger than Libya's.
(Don't think ⓒ can happen in Libya? The Eight-Nation Alliance didn't think it could happen in China either.)
One such project being built currently: https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu...
More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of batteries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023
"""
Being developed
It's bizarro land. It's pleasant enough, but it's not hard to see how Americans and Australians are related.
Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
https://youtu.be/SjJYNZirQCU
Whenever I see something mechanical made of bronze or something it always looks like a real waste. New finishes and coatings look pretty good and composites are strong and corrosion resistant, and steel is cheaper.
Not everything can be replaced but some can.
Doing the same for an energy project that might actually pay back (unlike the covid losses) is far less disruptive.
Finally, the amount of money hidden away in tax havens by the rich is nothing compared to this. Don’t drag down something as important as the climate crisis with some smooth brained class warfare.
Try to tax it away and use it for something that would benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less abstract to him.
It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade".
> B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them.
Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
Im just illustrating the difference between liquidity and wealth.
Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's.
When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up.
The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate.
The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumped into the public consciousness.
Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.
The difference being that most of that money ended up in rich people’s pockets, and are now causing a global economic crisis.
The rapid increase in just human labor prices seems to indicate that money is making it to people somehow because COVID didn’t kill enough of the labor force to have that kind of effect.
Something mitigating an ongoing can be expensive, have the intended positive effect immediately, but not be paid back for a long time (or sometimes ever).
Federally subsidized flood insurance is a much smaller scale example. There are many places in Florida and the gulf in general where houses get destroyed by hurricanes and have to be rebuild for $X every 20 years when we only collect maybe 25% of $X in premiums.
Reagan's achievement was to eliminate tax shelters in exchange for lower tax rates. This pulled the investment out of those unproductive shelters into productive activities, leading to the prosperity of the 80s.
Many of our current problems can be traced back to changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name. Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go up.
I'm amused you're blaming 2008 on Reagan.
That said, the link between presidential policy & short term economic changes is universally overstated. The government can cut down basic research funding and the effects won't be felt for a half century.
That can't help but produce positive economic changes.
I support tax cuts being tightly coupled with much reduced tax avoidance. Retroactively.
Citation needed. Show me data that demonstrates that use of tax havens is correlated to tax rates. The data over the last 30-40 years at least at first glance seems to disagree. Tax rates (in particular top income bracket, capital gains and corporate taxes) have continously reduced, while the amount of money in tax havens has increased.
You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.
And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.
Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
It's not communism.
I am referring to hydro quebec, and to the hydroelectric dams in central Washington State.
Would you claim that if we had let the free market build those hydroelectric dams using private capital instead, that we would have better results right now?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-energy-cfe-obrador-11655...
Think of the shareholders!
All that lost value could have gone to line their pockets, but instead it’s being used for the good of society (to be fair, probably to those same shareholders through different companies at exorbitant rates).
That is indeed the pitch the communists make. How is that working out for them?
Canada is very similar to the United States, another way of saying that is that Canada does things slightly different yet the results seem to be profoundly different than the States.
Why is that, and what are we as Canadians doing that Americans and others around the world should attempt to copy and improve upon?
Economics isn't science or maths when you get past the micro level. It is psychology.
If there is a Capitalist society that also has a deep respect for mental health, I say it only exists in Science Fiction from the 50s and 60s.
The goals of communism are pure and true, but insanely unrealistic considering we're talking about humans who still instinctually believe in a reality where scarcity is anything other than a human construct.
On the other hand, naturally, barely restrained capitalism is just going to be a giant cancer where the rich feast off the poor until it all goes down in flames.
What's needed is a shared sense of morality, community and survival across our species.
History says we're fucked.
Well, we get lovely toll gates about every 10 miles. Happily they’ve been automated so you can more or less just cruise on, but the constant “that’ll be $3, that’ll be $4, that’ll be $3.50” while you are driving can get on your nerves.
It's only the radical "right wing" (scare quotes because they bear no resemblance to "right wing" thought from before the 90s) that have challenged the government role in giving American industry the tools they need for success.
To call government funded infrastructure "communist" is the clearest illustration of the Overton Window I think I've ever seen.
However, dams are cheap enough for power generation that even with government inefficiency involved in their construction and operation, the power is so cheap that it doesn't matter.
Same with Ontario vs Manitoba or Quebec car insurance etc. Some things just suck when they're privatized - they focus on short term gain and end up with lousy infra and long term preparedness. I think HN has a pretty solid consensus on private telecom monopolies vs municipal fiber as well.
Back to topic, I thought most of usa private power monopolies are basically in dire straits from infra upkeep and maintenance and grid - there's a lot of bright knowledgeable folks on HN so I would genuinely appreciate comment if I'm way off base in my ignorant ways.
Private is cheaper if there is competition. Monopolies are always more costly, public or private.
While competition can indeed help illuminate new solutions, competition can also come in the form of different political parties and international comparisons.
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema_living...
I'll take the Australian Snowy River Hydro scheme over the mess in Texas any day.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/preliminary-report-l...
While Texans froze and natural gas-fired power plants tripped offline during a February cold snap, natural gas traders and pipeline companies made up to $11 billion in just nine days.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/11-billion-in-9-...
“I will say we understand that it would be unacceptable to just have customers bear the cost on their monthly bill and as if anybody could pay for that,” Gold-Williams said. “So we are working diligently - the financial services team is working diligently, trying to figure out ways to truly spread that cost, potentially maybe, you know 15 - I mean, 10 years or longer to try to make it affordable. We don’t have that fully assessed.”
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/02/19/skyrocketing-pric...
There are numerous counter examples to your overly broad "never ever" claims here.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
1) the empty arid land where we would put 40 million acres of solar panels is for the most part already owned by a state or national level government. go look at a map of how much of nevada is controlled by the BLM for instance.
2) governments already pay for electrical generation through nuclear power plants, building hydroelectric dams, etc. the question would be to apply that same money to building giant ground mount PV instead.
Aluminum is also quite abundant. Rate limits will be political rather than production. That's not to say this is a realistic idea or that it's worth doing, just that it isn't unthinkable on a resource basis.
https://www.anixter.com/en_us/resources/literature/wire-wisd...
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
The cheapest will rely on E = Fx, where F is air pressure, or gravity, or buoyancy. But liquified anhydrous ammonia, despite being more costly to make, will be extremely popular because it is easy to transport and store, and is fantastically useful for many purposes.
Ideally I suspect you don't really want utility storage anyway, you want something so cheap, small, and renewable you can do point of load storage and have a bit of grid independence, and not need as much transmission infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
There might not be a break-even point. Maybe ReBCO tape is just more expensive per amp it can transport than ordinary conductive metals like aluminum. Maybe HVDC lines can be boosted to arbitrarily high voltages such that you never need huge cables in the first place.
Superconductors get VERY exciting VERY quickly if they ever quench, and that is a property of the current and superconductor. You can't carry infinite current.
They may be more efficient, but they come with a whole host of challenges that make them difficult to use over long distances or in uncontrolled environments, which is pretty much what you'll have to deal with for long distance utility level power transfer.
I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-...
[2]: https://energycentral.com/news/shanghai-opens-world-leading-...
Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.
I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
Existing medium sizee drinking water desalination plants already create a huge amount of brine.
I guess you would need some pipes and pumps to move it away from your inlets, but that seems comparatively cheap.
The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
Either more efficient panels, cheaper panels, or simply a greater manufacturing capacity are all fine for securing the energy needs of the planet.
And we won’t have to worry about running out anytime in the next billion years or so.
Mores law also failed several times. More revised his initial 1965 estimate for a doubling every year in 1975. He predicted various doubling rates with the weakest form being transistors on a single chip every 2 years starting in 1980.
So, it’s current form isn’t an exponential increase in density but in terms of transistors on a single chip. If density actually doubled every 2 years then starting from 1971 an Intel 4004 @ 188 t/mm then we should have hit 6 million t/mm in 2001 and 197 t/mm in 2011. Except chips only broke 6 million in 2012 (11 years late) and are nowhere near 197 million t/mm in 2022.
Empty land is not necessarily a requirement.
Parking lot per-row shade structures that integrate PV panels on top are also a thing now, and there are sure a shitload of parking lots in NJ and out on long island.
We are well past the point where anyone can argue we should subsidize rooftop solar because we need to help build a fledgling industry - yet I see solar advocates continue to advocate for this wealth transfer from the poor to the well off.
Mounting structure is there, grid supply is there, no issues with weeds/grasses, generally up in the air etc.
Rooftops are unused space.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Rooftops are unused space, but the land use is generally a small part of the cost. Utility scale solar has real economies of scale compared to one-off small installations on someone's roof.
Arguing that Manhattan is expensive therefore PV doesn't work is like arguing Manhattan is expensive therefore agriculture doesn't work.
Also, the cheapest land I found was 4k/acre, still well above pfdietz’s estimate.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/0-Ward-Loomis-Rd-Oxford-N...
(~214 miles from Oxford NY to Manhattan by road)
(search in Zillow by county)
I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... has €0.43 per watt peak (STC watt) only for high-efficiency panels, the kind you buy when you're tight on space (or the cost of your installation is dominated by the cost of labor, as you say). "Mainstream" is €0.33/Wp and "low cost" is €0.22/Wp.
Also, these costs seem to be much higher as a result of the current supply-chain crisis. The low point so far was August 02020, with high-efficiency panels at €0.30/Wp and low-cost panels at €0.16/Wp. Probably at some point shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even lower than that.
plentiful wattage would be an interesting DIY project.
And the article seems to miss that wind is still beating solar from the LCOE charts I've seen. They keep making the towers taller and taller for better economies of scale.
Reverse metering is basically a shadow subsidy.
And I'm not arguing that the grid doesn't need to be adapted or needs work, but if we have a lot of home generation, then we don't need to worry as much about increasing overall grid capacity to handle BEV home charging.
Our council is currently promoting group buying discounts for solar and/or battery systems, and the state government had been running solar installation rebates/credits for several years.
This project (CO2 to CH4) would benefit from maximum raw production per panel, if you can ramp the plants up and down, so aim them south. I've been deploying, both for my solar and for some other residential projects I'm helping with, east-west facing panels, to get production up as early in the morning as possible and run it late. You get less kWh per panel than south facing, but you get a system that, on a good day, is producing from sunup to sundown, even when those set far north of east/west. Out here, peak days are almost 45 degrees north of E/W for sunrise/sunset.
Iron Ridge XR1000 and some locally welded frames work pretty darn well for this sort of thing, if you have the ground area for it.
Now, with panels sub-$0.50/W, you can accomplish the same thing (more power) for far less money by just putting more panels on. You get less production per nameplate panel watt, but the total system costs are usually lower. And you can push your DC:AC ratios pretty high if you want - cap your inverter out on sunny days, but still get more power on cloudy days. It just depends on what you're trying to optimize for.
I still see trackers on occasion - they're cool. But the only place they're useful is if you have some stiff limit on nameplate capacity. Out here, you're limited to a 25kW system for residential, and you can't exceed your local transformer capacity in panel area - not inverter output (why, I have no idea, I've gotten a range of BS reasons that mostly center around somehow changing the system, blowing up the transformer, and then the power company being on the hook for a new transformer). So if you want to run a large "residential" site (think a ranch or something like that with a bunch of outbuildings), you can hit the 25kW limit quickly, and then need to go to a tracker to increase kWh generated on your 25kW system.
But outside edge cases like that, just put more panels on. The systems I'm helping people with are mostly A-frames, with east-west facing panels for long solar days, and a fairly high DC/AC ratio. I've got 7kW of panel on 6kW of inverter, though I rarely see the inverter past 4500W, which is by design - I don't like pegging out power electronics for long periods of time, and prefer to run things at 80% of design load or lower for longevity reasons.
In the US, land is widely available at around $1000/acre. The current cost to cover that with PV is around $100,000/acre (depending on the fill factor).
So, land costs are not a substantial obstacle to reduction in the cost of PV energy.
If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10% annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.
All those crazy people moving to AZ and NV in the US did something right. Their energy costs to AirCon is going to need it.
But actually this seems like it would position well certain parts of the US that are growing (sun belt).
We can't shift cities to electricity generation. We historically choose population centres in places with optimal conditions like having good water flow or natural protection with mountain ranges or good level land.
Most industry needs access to transport with shipping being the cheapest.
If you look in Zillow you'll see that's very wrong.
The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
The problem is that rooftop solar is not lowering those distribution costs in any substantial fashion.
Unless you mean that powerwalls are banned?
I’m vaguely attached to a utility scale deal trying to happen. The land owners are interested, the utility is interested, and there isn’t much around the site. Still the details might kill the deal- they can’t agree where the HV lines will run, the utility wants a bit more land than the owners want to lease, access details and liability concerns are coming up, etc…
Utility scale solar is the future but rooftop solar gets installed NOW because each deal is simpler.
Now why my utility isn’t building out solar fields in the massive amounts of land they own around their coal and oil fired plants…
When you don't have to pay rent on land, you don't need to pack the panels cheek by jowl. Pasture doesn't normally generate much revenue, per acre, and it tends to be all at once, so something producing year-round is a welcome buffer. The livestock keep down weeds and benefit from shelter, so are healthier.
On water, the panels are kept cool and therefore both notably more efficient, but also last much longer. Nobody knows yet how much longer. They cut evaporation and biofouling.
While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free.
For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had to be paid for, my guess is it's VERY cheap.
Solar coexists synergetically with many other uses, most particularly reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling and runs cooler, thus more efficiently (up to 2x vs desert); and pasture, where it also cuts evaporation, and the livestock can duck under to get out of sun and rain, and keep weeds down; and cropland, where it cuts water and heat stress, often increasing yield. Siting on industrial and warehouse roofing makes roofs last longer.
Agriculturally, bifacial fence-rows running north-south are easiest and cheapest to deploy, and collecting most in morning and afternoon better matches demand curves.
Siting solar panels in deserts will soon be recognized as very stupid. They collect dust and run hot, cutting their output often in half. Siting them in single-use arrays not in desert is almost as bad.
Just now Utah is frantic about the Great Salt Lake drying up and then blanketing the region in toxic dust. Cover it over with solar panels, and it will fill back up.
They are great because they shade the cars, and often the installation cost is $0 because the installer will sign a X year agreement with the occupier to provide electricity at Y cost for a number of years.
https://www.revolution-energetique.com/pourquoi-ces-habitant...
We had three presidential candidates running on a platform of "windmills are ugly, let's not do that", and at least three on the platform of "nuclear plants are dangerous, let's not do that". I'm kinda worried that "solar panels are ugly, let's not do that" is gaining traction; and I wonder who's going to be the first to oppose dams, but there's a niche.
There are so many parking lots, where cars just bake in the sun, that would benefit from solar parking roofing. Cars would have to cool less, and the landowners would have another steady stream of income (its the upfront costs that are the problem as always).
TBH I look forward to a time where you can pull into a supermarket, shaded by solar panel roof, and I can hook up my EV to charge while I'm pulling groceries from the shelves. (Not that I expect the solar to be able to provide all the power needed for EV charging).
It’s not just about people falling off roofs, the kW people can install per hour goes down. Similarly you rarely stick solar trackers on roofs and can’t on simple floating platforms while the majority of grid installs use at least single axis tracking which provides more power in the morning and evening.
So, you are concern trolling, and badly. That is unwelcome here.
Too, anybody not already handy with putting up fencing is no farmer.
Finally, sunshine really is as free as anything ever, and the buckets are cheap and getting cheaper.
Permian Energy Centre is a just completed 460MW project in Texas that uses 1 axis solar trackers. This continues the trend of ~70% of US grid scale installs use single axis tracking, even though it’s a tiny slice of the home market at scale it’s a clear win.
Yes they are more expensive per kWh, but a better match the demand curve means higher profits.
Like inflammable/flammable.
a) what the sun does
or b) a potential (though IMO somewhat nutty) geoengineering project to simply reflect a bunch of sunlight back into space before it heats us up.
What you're describing sounds like maybe "resolation"? (Though also sounds like it's increasing the total amount of insolation, and thus would accelerate climate change...it's actually very similar to the soletta mirror designed to do exactly that, described in Lois Bujold's _Komarr_, part of the Vorkosigan space-opera saga.)
Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.
I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
So say you pulled down 30 units of CO2 and 1 unit of Methane leaked (3%), you’re back to square one. Not to mention the Methane will be burned into CO2 again so this closed cycle isn’t so closed.
This study suggests up to 9% is leaked currently:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/03/24/methane-leaks-much-wors...
At the point where you are doing enough direct air capture of CO₂ to supply a substantial fraction of the world fuel demand, you're also doing enough direct air capture to capture a substantial fraction of world CO₂ emissions. At that point you can just pump some of it into natural gas fields instead of converting it to CH₄.
All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.
I do think that plastering the world with solar panels would be a real problem, and the logic of living systems suggests that it's a problem we'll have to contend with at some point. There's nothing that inherently limits human energy usage to anything like current human energy usage, so if solar panels are cheap, eventually someone will want to cover the oceans and forests with them.
— ⁂ —
However, that will probably not become a problem for more than 50 years. Right now we're only talking about replacing current human energy usage, which is only about 18 terawatts, last I checked, including non-electrical energy. (See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...: 162494 terawatt hours in 02017 = 18.537 TW.) With cheap 16%-efficient solar panels and a nominal solar constant of 1000 W/m², that would nominally be about 120 000 km² of solar panels, half the size of Idaho.
But we have to take into account capacity factors, which range from 10% in extremely polar countries like Germany and the Netherlands, through 29% in California, to even higher in deserts. (I'd be very pleased to have some concrete, trustworthy figures on the capacity factors of real utility-scale PV plants in places like Abu Dhabi or Chile.) So we're talking about 400 000 to 1.2 million km², almost half the size of Kazakhstan. Once you set the panels apart so you can angle them toward the equator without them shadowing each other, we're talking about roughly the entire size of Kazakhstan. But presumably Kazakhstan itself is sunnier than that, so a better intuition pump would be the northernmost 20% of Siberia, the part where the permafrost is melting due to climate change, or all of Alaska. (Siberia is 13.1 million km².)
But I proposed building ten times as much solar panel capacity in cloudy places, not three times as much. And that's because, although the capacity of utility-scale PV farms in places like the Netherlands averages 10% year-round, it's only about 2% in the winter, because it gets cloudy. So, if we were talking about a worst case conservative limit in which the whole world is as bad for PV as the Netherlands, and also failed to store a summer harvest of tasty methane to burn in the winter, we need 6 million km² of solar panels, probably spread over 12 million km², the size of all of Siberia.
If 1 m² of solar panel modules weighs 40 kg (I'm too lazy to look this up right now but it's the right order of magnitude due to the glass and aluminum, even though the actual silicon cells are under 300 grams) we're talking about 240 billion tonnes of solar panels, not just a measly few million.
— ⁂ —
So, wait, isn't that a huge problem? Doesn't that end up with a country-sized landfill and plastering the world? At 2.4 g/cc and a typical 10 m landfill depth we're talking about 10000 km², which would be, yes, the size of a small country; Monaco is 2.02 km², Cyprus is 10452 km², and Kuwait is 17818 km².
But probably you'd dig the landfill deeper if you were building such a big one. Or pile it higher and just build an earth berm around it instead of digging. At 164 m deep it would be 606 km², the area of Chicago. Technically Chicago is still the size of a small country because there are about 15 countries smaller than Chicago but I think "small-country-sized" is a misleading description of Chicago. I think "less than half the size of Anson County, Georgia, population 22055" is a more illuminating description of 600 km² than "small-country-sized" or even "Chicago-sized". I hope this doesn't ...
One more question, if you don't mind - how many toxic materials do these panels contain? From what I've read, a typical landfill is designed to be leaktight for a couple centuries at most. After that, whatever heavy metals and other toxins were in the panels can start leaking into the ground and groundwater. It would suck to leave a bunch of poison drips for the future generations.
Basically silicon PV panels (the kind universally used now) are significantly less toxic than table salt and basically nearly else in your house.
The PV cells themselves contain silicon, aluminum, silver, and trace amounts of phosphorus and boron, and now sometimes gallium. Upon exposure to air or water the silicon surface passivates by forming a layer of amorphous silicon dioxide, which protects the silicon from further corrosion even in strong acids and room-temperature strong bases. Amorphous silicon dioxide is also used as an inert filler in pills, an abrasive in toothpaste, and one of the two main ingredients in simethicone, a treatment for gas pains. If you ground up the PV cells finely enough you could add them to your food with no ill effects.
Most of the mass of the panel is glass, which is also mostly amorphous silicon dioxide with small amounts of calcium and sodium oxides. This you could also add to your food in powder form with no ill effects, contrary to urban legends about ground-glass poisoning.
Gluing the PV cells to the glass is normally EVA, poly(ethylene-vinyl acetate). This is the material crafting hot-glue sticks is made from, as well as flip-flops, mouthguards, yoga mats, and those soft foam toys for kids. Less well known is that it's used as an extended-release drug delivery vehicle in implants: the drug slowly leaches out of the plastic inside your body, while the plastic remains unchanged. It has no known adverse effect on human health.
Sealing the back of the modules is a thin layer of, typically, polyvinyl fluoride (tedlar), which is also relatively biologically inert, but not to the same extreme as the rest of the materials. It's commonly used for raincoats and whiteboards. Hydrofluorocarbons tend to be of relatively low toxicity, but it's not thoroughly biocompatible in the same way as its cousin PVDF, or as EVA and silicon. Some panels are instead made with polypropylene or polyethylene terephthalate, which are as extremely nontoxic as the other materials.
The cells' electrical connections are soldered together with solder. Traditionally this was lead and tin, which does leach lead, though very slowly. Nowadays lead-free solder is used, typically consisting of tin and silver. This is another thing you can eat freely, although there might be traces of flux left from soldering.
The frames are normally made of aluminum, which is extremely nontoxic.
So, no heavy metals except tin and silver, which are nontoxic. Except that silver is toxic to bacteria.
There have been some experiments with nickel/copper plating to reduce the amount of (costly) silver used; I'm not sure if these are in production. Although nickel and copper are pretty safe, they're not nearly as astoundingly nontoxic as the other materials listed above. If you eat chunks of copper you will get sick.
Some thin-film panels have been made with more toxic materials like cadmium, selenium, copper, and tellurium, but they have mostly been driven out of the market by silicon PV cells. The total amount of these materials was small, but it's been found that they could leach out in an acid landfill. But they're not present in silicon cells.
So basically everything you have in your house is way more toxic than solar panels. Latex paint? Toxic polymers. Steel knife? Potential for iron poisoning. Concrete? There's substantial trace levels of many heavy metals in the cement, and it's basic enough to burn your skin, plus there are probably superplasticizer additives that are more toxic than anything listed above. Books? Likely still have trace levels of dioxin from bleaching the paper, plus most of the color inks are more toxic than anything in a solar panel. Polyurethane dishwashing sponge? Polyurethane is definitely not a thing you should eat. Foam cushions in furniture? In addition to polyurethane those contain halogenated fire retardants that are suspected of causing mass endocrine disruption. Wood cu...
> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."
Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.
> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.
This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu...
Annualized, that's an average power of 33.5 GW.
On http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see in the yearly demand view that peak demand for the year was under 40 GW.
This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.
Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)
I think we can safely expect some records to be broken on the battery storage front in the next few years. Think orders of magnitude here. About three or so in terms of storage capacity. A a couple of thousand x what we have today.
Basically, the likes of Tesla and other manufacturers are really ramping up battery production in the next few years. If you assume EVs have 50kwh batteries (nice number to work with), 2 million cars would have 100,000,000 kwh of battery. Or 100 gwh, or 0.1 twh. That's what they are shooting for end of this year as a production volume. Tesla is aiming for 10-20 million cars per year longer term and the total market is something like 100m vehicles, give or take. 20 million cars is 1 twh. So, we'll be churning out ~5 twh of battery per year; just for cars. Eventually there will be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road. That's an enormous amount of batteries. And of course there will be other vehicles, dedicated grid storage solutions, etc.
Total installed battery capacity world wide will soon hit tens of twh. To give you an idea of just how much that is, annual energy production globally is in the order of 25 peta watt hours (25000 twh). Or about 70twh per day.
The volume of EVs on the road in a few decades will have enough battery capacity to provide that for several days. And of course a lot of car batteries get a second life in the form of grid storage before they eventually get recycled. Car batteries are good for a few thousand cycles. So, for people worrying about durability, once we have tens of twh of batteries, they might be used for decades to power the world before they need replacing. And we'll use solar and other cheap energy sources to keep them topped up.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
However, making war less costly (for the victor) could well cause more wars. I believe that before WW I many a war of conquest was initiated by states hoping to profit. WW I was thought by many states as another great chance to profit, but it turned out that mechanization of logistics, and artillery, meant the toll of war was much lower.
Besides, the 'ospolitik' was more about building relationships and mutual respect than an attempt to affect the cost-revenue analysis of war.
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.
We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up
Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
Yeah, Jerry Pournelle used to say on this topic, "it's raining soup, and we're too stupid to hold out a bowl."
Well, now we're at least holding out a few soup spoons, and making some more every year.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/
> CO2 concentration is performed using a closed lime/calcite calcination cycle, operating at ambient temperature and pressure.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
But the cold part of the cycle, that actually concentrates the CO2 is fun to do at lab-scale, you just have to buy the CaO (and prepare for it becoming very hot).
Edited to add: """…Current CdTe panels contain approximately 6 g/m2, resulting in cadmium emissions of 0.5g/GWh, equivalent to that of a coal fired power plant. The majority of these emissions (77%) result from mining and utilization of the modules, therefore a comprehensive collection and recycling program would not reduce the environmental impacts of these panels. """ -- Brookhaven National Lab
So there you go. Even if you take all retired utility-grade thin-film PV panels, grind them to a fine powder, and scatter them in the biosphere, you still emit less Cd than a coal-fired power station.
This is the same level of logic used against nuclear power, yes if we'd invested in this in the 80s and 90s (even the 00s) we wouldn't be having these conversations and Russia wouldn't be an energy superpower... I feel like a certain amount of "what's going with people" because I'm having to grow up with these decisions not embrace living through the era that made them...
In the EU and elsewhere there's a healthy market in used panels; when a large scale installation upgrades to newer/better panels, the used panels go on the market and end up in places where people don't care about the efficiency per area.
That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.
Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper.
The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power, which would be good for the planet and people in general (and unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).
If you're living in an economic system where investment is primarily determined by rate of profit, then you need to identify a solution where everyone involved is making more money than they would be without you. So it's very important they're competing with oil on economic terms while increasing demand for solar.
You are aware of the situation in western Europe, yes?
So I mean, I assume the original point is about supply/demand, but supply of gas is already short, prices are already high, alternatives are already cheaper, and yet our system is still failing to take any action that might lead to a survivable outcome. So the supply/demand thing seems like a completely meaningless tangent at this point??
The other part you're missing is that this decouples fuel production from locations with large fossil fuel sources (often run by governments with authoritarian rulers who use their exports as leverage). This means that you can spread production to anywhere the sun shines which means highly decentralized, local production of electrofuels.
The third part you're missing is how this increases demand for solar panels and carbon sequestration technology which has an amazing feedback loop that makes these cheaper and more efficient over the decades, meaning that as hydrocarbon demand declines over time as other technologies take over (e.g., electric cars reducing demand from the transportation sector), this built up intellectual capital and infrastructure can be used to just sequester carbon for long-term storage, which would be net negative instead of just carbon neutral.
There's probably more you're missing but I'd just recommend reading more of the blog where he explains everything.
Because it’s not clear how fast we can get absolutely massive amounts of grid storage or nuclear deployed, finding ways to make effectively carbon-neutral natural gas/petroleum is a good step in the right direction, where we can continue to use some hydrocarbons without a net increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and oceans.
It’s also not clear if we will be able to replace all of our current petroleum reliant industrial processes with non-carbonized alternatives, and in those cases, this will be the absolute best case for us.
There may be billions of vehicles on the road, but as soon as the system fails to be able to upkeep all the deployed capital required to maintain them in operating condition (road resurfacing, parts manufacture, refinement and transportation of fuel, maintaining the value of currency in order to motivate the workers to participate in all of the necessary steps, security from hostilities, roads not being flooded/melted, and so on). In such eventualities sizeable portions of the fleet may be rendered inoperable quite quickly and cars will be displaced, out of necessity, by walking.
What you're making is a different point, it's not that we can't displace hydrocarbons, it's that we can't displace them with something equivalent-or-better. We can probably displace cars with walking, concrete structures with ad-hoc shelters, and hospitals with prayer. That is all not just very achievable, but has actually been increasing in inevitability during our prior decades of "inaction" (obviously you can't really call it inaction when we're taking positives steps to hasten these outcomes)
Methane has some significant advantages over electricity: it's storable over time and can be used to fuel vehicles. About a third of the vehicles in this country are methane-fueled, in fact. A CNG tank is a hell of a lot cheaper than a car-sized lithium battery. If you go further and make the methane into kerosene you can fly airplanes with it. Airplanes can't fly while they're plugged into the grid.
Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)
Maybe not the best idea then.
The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi
Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function.
It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.
https://electrek.co/2022/03/07/solar-and-battery-storage-mak...
"Substituting solar power into our electrical grid and atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons into our fuel supply chain is just the beginning. We want to support a future of abundance and wealth, while avoiding starvation even as legacy climate damage shifts rainfall patterns and causes extreme weather."
Seems pretty one-track to me.
Also, there are no manufacturing processes with infinite scalability. And the article fails to make clear their large scale intentions. They go back and forth between some Sarahan style plant, and the total amount of PV available and the current planned excess power due to this and never offer a solid plan as far as I can tell.
Aside from that.. it's a back of the envelope analysis that just projects trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for emergent phenomenon due to the massive market swings it projects.
seems like there's a lot of this going around recently
A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer.
Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers...
300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible potential.
Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the tech.
A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
As you said, this trend will keep on going.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Real world example, one of the biggest batteries in the world likely will be paid off in 2-3 years: https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-austr...
Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world" stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly, so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the grid for one hour).
For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities. And we still don't have enough storage to replace nonrenewables with solar.
Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to replace nonrenewable generation.
But it is a promising technology. If many are built quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten or twenty years.
1: According to the US Energy Information administration, the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
That's about 127 MWh per second.
2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy storage capacity of 553 GWh accounted for 93% of utility-scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-hydro...
But I'm happy to discuss this too. That 50% figure is a peak (achieved when conditions were favorable) and ignores imported electricity.
According to [1], renewables accounted for 41% of power production in Germany in 2021, but only 16.1% of primary energy consumption.
AIUI, that difference comes from (a) imports and (b) the fact that primary energy consumption also includes heating and transport, two sectors that often aren't directly powered by electricity yet, but which must be before an economy can stop consuming non-renewable energy.
1: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.
Capturing CO2 is not ‘energy cheap’ and therefore it is best when and where possible much of what we start capturing to rid it from the carbon cycle rather than re-introduce it.
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-po...
For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
There was an article/discussion here recently about heat batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement at scale.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006791
*This is a rhetorical question, I'm sure everyone can easily think of many benefits. But there is elegance in simplicity.
So this kind of thing may only be viable for industrial processes.
I wonder: Why is sand better than the dirt that’s already on site? Dirt, after all, contains water, which I believe should have an even higher thermal capacity, or not?
Also: How about combining this approach with a heat pump instead of resistive heating?
The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of education, and three small scope issues that range from unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made nuclear too expensive to be viable.
Money talks, shit walks. The captains of industry and finance are treating nuclear like the failure it is. No money for this money pit.
Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high.
For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).
At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.
In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?
Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
But it certainly can: by capturing on a point source that burns biological fuel. Without the burning, all the CO2 emitted (or captured) would have cycled back to the air a short time later anyways. And if you mainly do it to have a cheap carbon source to make some intermittent energy source you already have storable/transportable (e.g. creating aircraft fuel), just about any low grade biomass will do. Grass. Leaves. Dried algae. Paper too dirty for recycling (or rather: any paper - does paper recycling even make any sense in an economy that also burns wood for energy?). When you start looking at incineration not as disposal and/or energy source, but as a source of concentrated CO2, almost anything turns into a useful resource. All that stuff contains carbon, and it's all going back into the atmosphere one way or another.
https://verdox.com/technology
Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.
The figures I've seen suggest that the capex cost of a coal power plant — which is basically a nuclear power plant without the nuclear reactor — is high enough to be uncompetitive with PV in most of the world now, even if the coal were free. So I'm skeptical that GE or CGN has found a way to make their nuclear power plants as cheap as PV, except in, like, Manchuria or Svalbard or something.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
Are you thinking of lcoe instead of total system cost by chance?
I'm definitely not talking about LCOE; I'm just talking about up-front capex. Conceivably nuclear plants could be cheaper to build than PV farms, but still have a worse LCOE, but I don't think they're even cheaper to build. Even for China, which is the best in the world at building things.
This article says the PRC plans to build another 147 GW for a total of 200 GW by 02035, over 14 years, averaging 10 GW per year. Total PRC marketed energy consumption is on the order of 6 TW (6000 GW), though I'm extrapolating that from a figure of 28 PWh/year in 02010 and an increase in energy consumption of 90% since then, and I'd be delighted to have more reliable data.
So the plan is to add an additional 2% to their energy supply (assuming capacity factor 90%) in the form of nuclear — over the course of 14 years, during which time their total energy consumption will presumably roughly double.
In that context this doesn't seem like a huge bet on nuclear to me.
The article says, "China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt." That's roughly six times the cost of PV plants—barely competitive with PV in polar and cloudy regions where PV capacity factors are 10-15%, completely unviable in sunny regions where PV capacity factors approach 30%.
I don't have figures yet for 02021 (do you?) but in 02020, looking only at electric power generation, they installed 48.2 GW(p) of new solar, 71.7 GW(p) of new wind, and 38.4 GW(e) of new coal. If the capacity factors are average for the energy source, that would be 6.3 GW(mean) of new solar, 16 GW(mean) of new wind, and 19.2 GW(mean) of new coal, and yes, PRC's average coal capacity factor really is reported to be just 50%. Solar and wind have been rising much faster.
So that's the context in which I'm saying the CPC doesn't seem to think nuclear power is economically competitive with renewables. It's already installing more renewables than nuclear, even after derating for the different capacity factors and including these future nuclear plans, which may fail to materialize, and it has been for years.
What's your interpretation?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227823 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PV_cume_semi_log_cha...
We can evidently not even predict inflation correctly from one month to the next so it seems unlikely that we can know what a nuclear plant actually costs.
France has certainly not known, they're currently over 40 billion dollars in debt for their plants (to be paid by taxpayers when they nationalize the operator), and they have over a million cubic meters of waste that needs manpower to manage for longer than France has existed as a nation.
Instead of nuclear plants in 0.1% of the Sahara, I propose solar panels on 10% of existing parking lots. Much easier, much faster, much cheaper, and coming generations will thank us instead of curse us. :)
//crashoverrideCIA ;)
By the way, France has existed as a nation for about 1700–1800 years. Maybe you mean "longer than France has existed as a state."
______
† There are a few coal-industry shills raising alarms about cadmium, but of course the currently popular kinds of solar panel contain no cadmium, and even the ones that did contain cadmium didn't pose a real problem because of the minuscule quantities and their resistance to corrosion.
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/media/van-jones-bezos-100-mil...
* https://www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/press-room/jeff-bezo...
I'm working on a sci-fi book wherein a young girl solves world hunger; alpha readers wanted (see profile).
Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
"U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmark: Q1 2020"
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf
For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01 per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters, electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system) accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11. The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the stacked bar chart, but below $0.02.
Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are already companies working on automating additional elements of solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY
AES claims that with this robot, a crew of only 3 people can install a megawatt of panels in a week:
https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar
You could install all the panels for a 100 megawatt solar farm like that analyzed above with 6 months and 12 people.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.
Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.
Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.
Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.
Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?
Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.
The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.
I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.
Banning advertisment outright is about as realistic as banning humans from communicating.
Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
> Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person
Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.
It's incredibly common.
Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?
If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
Those weren’t caused by the species themselves though
Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening, and it's caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
A mass extinction event isn't a line of dominos toppling over, but can be stopped. A mass extinction event is something that has started that can't be stopped.
Luckily, the conservation studies continue, because they understand we haven't entered into an actual mass extinction event. We've simply used it as a tool to drum up necessary attention and funding for preservation before we actually find ourselves in one.
This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.
Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past five years of cost data.
Taking a bus is cheaper than flying, but if you want to get somewhere fast you need to fly. Price is just one metric.
This wouldn't happen unless they actually were cheaper.
However, regulated monopolies in other parts of the country have no incentive to innovate or use newer technology. Thus they make their five year plans (usually called IRPs) with opaque financial models with out-of-date costs, leading to bad decision making.
Maybe a different way to ask the same sort of question is: What would the auto industry look like now if the political climate had been more favorable towards electric vehicles?
I'm taking about specific market forces in the electricity market in the US, not the car market.