Slashdot Mirror
Solar Power Play
dpilgrim writes "While American power companies continue to chase vanishing oil reserves, the Japanese are once again a step ahead in innovation. Reuters is carrying this story about Sharp's new manucfacturing plant in the U.S. Sharp will begin manufacturing solar batteries stateside, and expects more than half its solar battery sales to be in the U.S. by 2004. Looks like a good use for that south-facing hillside on my property."
what the "news" here is. Haven't solar panels been available for quite a while now? Is the article's point just that Sharp is moving operations to the U.S.? Or is the point that Americans have a greater demand for solar power now?
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Me: http://www.robertdhill.com/
Will manufacturing the units domestically lower their price? I would hope so since the shipping costs will be significantly lower. The article states that it currently costs $8-9K to setup the average US home with solar power. This is a lot less than I had thought and if you bring it down another couple $K your looking at almost a 5 year ROI for anyone with serious usage.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
California could spends the $$$ it's getting back from energy companies (that robbed it blind during Enron's heyday) to pave the Mojave Desert with solar cells
Do you have any idea what effect shifting the albedo of that big a chunk of the earth's surface would have on climate patterns?
Neither do I -- but it would almost certainly make the effect of all the carbon-based emissions in human history pale by comparison...
Photovoltaic systems still have a long way to go to become economical enough to compete with more conventional methods.
You get about 100 watts of solar radiation per square foot (perpendicular to the sun's rays). Current commercial PV cells are, at best, 15% efficient.. so now you have 15 watts of electricity per square foot.
A conventional powerplants generate roughly 500-1000 Megawatts each. Doing the math, you'ld need well over 32 million square feet of collection area to match that... roughly 765 acres of active surface. PV arrays can't be packed together either, because they would cast shadows on eachother... so the actual real-estate required would be 4 or 5 times that!
Even if the PV cells were *free*, the cost of installation, service, and the land itself would be astronomical! There's no way a solar farm could pay for itself.
Nobody is going to stop burning coal and oil anytime soon (unless they run out!)
Not to say PV cells don't have their uses, of course. Cheap PV panels can certaintly help ease the energy budget!
=Smidge=
1) Cost.
2) Energy already travels from the sun to earth at the speed of light. You're not going to get it here any faster. Electromagnetic radiation travels through space without loss (save for interference from objects and gravity fields).
3) What if the beam of highly concentrated energy misses the near-earth target?
4) Where are you going to PUT the near-earth target?
5) Everything we use for energy today exists because of the sun (except for nuclear, anyways, but that's leftovers from some other star), so basically we're running on locally stored solar energy...
=Smidge=
the biggest cost is the capital cost for solar power. 8-9K is a lot of money. True, the ROI calculations will show 5 year return, but it is very unlikely that households will invest 8-9K on a new untested technology. The only way this would work, is if there are some major players who would install it across a large community and then include the cost in HOA. Until that happens, individual home owners will be reluctant. Also, the businesses also needs to take lead before individuals do. Forget about solar power, we haven't seen people paying extra for car fuel efficiency which is much well understood by consumers.
Any chance of our tax $$ promoting solar power--providing long-range and short-range benefits, helping us break our dependence on fossil fuels?
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
The article says that Sharp will invest $3 million into their US plant, and with that they expect to corner the market.
I'm a little stunned. With that PUNY amount of money they can do that? It seems to me like everyone else must be completely oblivious to that market.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
2) Energy already travels from the sun to earth at the speed of light. You're not going to get it here any faster.
My point wasn't to get it here faster. The point is to get it while it's less dissipated. If we had no sun near us, but only stars, you could use the same argument: Why would you want to travel to a star that's a hundred light-years away to collect energy? Energy from there already travels at the speed of light....
Yes, it travels at the speed of light, but it also radiates outward in a sphere, and by the time it hits us, it's very dissipated. If you can collect some of it while the "sphere of radiating-outward" is still fairly small (e.g. ten miles, one hundred miles, one thousand miles, or one million miles from the sun), then the same AREA of solar-collection is now worth much much more.
If I could choose to power my house from a solar cell on my roof or from a solar cell that's half-way between the Earth and the sun, I would choose to have my house powered by the latter. The question is, how do you get the considerably larger amount of electricity that you can harness while closer to the sun to OVER here.
If we could "transport" electricity free of charge, then we'd be stupid to build local power plants, instead of going to the sun, collecting a large-ass amount of electricity (hell, even while FALLING INTO IT, eventually disintegrating), and all the while transport that electricity instantly to Earth, it would save us a lot.
Question is, how do we get it from there to here?
So you see, there are two real questions.
1. Can we send something to the sun that will collect an insane amount of electricity in a brief period of time.
2. Can we store an insanely large amount of electricity in a small package, and can we get it back to Earth and use the energy from it.
If we can do 1 and 2, then it doesn't matter if the program costs $100,000,000,000, because we can stop producing power, stop buying oil, etc.
With an arbitrary amount of energy at our disposal, we can use electrolysis of water (a fairly inefficient system), to get hydrogen. We'd have clean, cheap power for everyone. Is all the oil the world uses for the next fifty years worth one hundred billion dollars?
If so, then it's not a question of "how much" will (1) and (2) cost, but merely "is it possible."
I don't know if it's possible.
I was looking for a physicist's answer of whether it is.
Also true. :-)
I'm just amused how many people assume that solar power (or wind power, for that matter) are without other effects. What seems like `free' power when used to power a single house or a small complex becomes quite different when used in scale.
After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking that energy out of the environment is less clear...
>After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking that energy out of the environment is less clear...
Taking it out of the environment? What do you mean? It all ends up as heat. Installed on roof-tops I can't think of any change this would cause, except decreasing regional over-heating caused by asphalt roofs. Installed in a desert, I expect the impact would be even smaller.
Also keep in mind that these devices aren't terribly efficient (and don't need to be -- they just need to be cheap), so most of it's going directly to heat, anyway, just like it did before.
This is really politically correct nonsense.
The environmental cost of producing (and later
discarding) rechargable batteries and solar cells
is vastly larger than the collateral costs of
producing power centrally, particularly if
the central production is nuclear. And there is
almost no petroleum-based utility electric in
the U.S.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Actually, think about what you're saying -- suppose we indeed cover the desert with photoelectric panels, thus absorbing massive amounts of energy which would previously have been taken up by the sand, and shunting that energy off to power a city or two.
Well, night comes, and that power is no longer being reradiated into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is now substantially cooler in the region, weather patterns change, and the climate shifts.
The same goes for a city -- an asphalt roof may absorb and radiate at different rates than a rock or a stretch of sand, but the difference is nothing compared to a device which absorbs and does not re-radiate.
A similar pattern occurs with wind power, by the way -- a wind farm of sufficient size can cause drastic changes in regional wind patterns.
Actually, even with the cloudiness of the Puget Sound I'm sure this will be a big hit. The MF'ing power companies have to buy power from you if you produce it :)
In a recent television interview that I saw, Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Hydrogen Economy", was asked what his view was about the direction United States was taking versus the European Union on renewable energy use.
He said that United States continues to move in the direction of higher non-renewable energy use (as evidenced by the increasing popularity of SUV's and the current president's agenda for oil drilling in Alaska), while the European Union has set a goal to attain, by 2010, a minimum penetration of 12% of renewable energy sources.
"In this regard", he went on to say, "it appears as if the New World is becoming the Old World and the Old World is becoming the New World."
Words to think about.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Actually, we already have a name for a device that absorbs and does not re-radiate certain amounts of solar energy that you used to be able to find all over the place before major cities grew up. It's called vegetation. Most vegetation has high absorption in the infrared-red ranges. That's how chlorophyll works. You can actually get a good vegetation index of an area by looking at infrared-red absorption patterns in satellite photos.
Large cities already make large changes to the weather. This is known and well documented. As a result of the linked study, Atlanta has doubled efforts to increase greenery in the city limits to mitigate the climate effect and the city's image as "Hotlanta." The problem is that asphalt absorbs a LOT more heat and light than natural greenery or sand. That's why it's black, oddly enough.
Furthermore, solar panels aren't all-consuming one-way doors of solar energy. Solar panels only get 5-20% efficiency. The rest of that is reflected or reradiated as heat. No matter how many solar panels you blanketed city rooftops with, it wouldn't keep urban areas from being a stronger source of heat than surrounding areas.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is certainly true, but two notes: first off, urban areas are a relatively small percentage of the total land mass of the world, and secondly, they make crappy sites for wind farms or solar panel arrays -- most proposals for large farms of solar panels are, like the post above, for conversion of desert, prairie, or similar environments.
I think one could even do this over cropland or grazing land.
The initial cost is high, but the per watt cost is only a few times what is needs to be to be ecconomical in the long run. If we ever serously take into account the environmental costs of fossil fuel, some of these "expensive" options might not be so expensive.
I suspect it would not be so different. That it re-radiates less of what it absorbs might be offset by the fact that it absorbs more.
That doesn't make any sense actually -- there's a finite amount of solar energy hitting any given point on the earth's surface, which means if you absorb more you are also changing the local environment. More generally, however, the fact remains that some 20% of the energy striking a solar panel is converted to electricity and shunted off to a nearby (or distant) city. That's energy which would have been in the local environemnt which has been removed.
That's nothing compared to what a bunch of office buildings would do.
There's not a city on earth that's more than a fraction of the size of the Mojave desert. Nor is it clear to me that the difference between pavement and sand is even close to the difference between either and a photovoltaic cell.
Do you see why the statistic you post is deceptive? It's certainly true that `95%' of Singapore or Monaco is urban, but that's because these nations borders are the borders of their city -- both of these nations are truly tiny.
More generally, if all the world's population were relocated to the United States, the population density would be no greater than the current population density of Manhattan -- and the US is a pretty small portion of the Earth's surface.
Give us an example of this having actually happened. And remember, your example has to be at least as large in impact relative to watt added to the grid as you would get from, say, the effects of a diesel-powered plant.
Real world. Not foolishness.
Just to give you a starting point, try comparing the california wind farms to the enormous amounts of heated water let out into rivers at even test and research reactors.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
What you miss is that there haven't been any solar farms of even close to the scale discussed in this thread constructed. Anywhere.
However, it's trivial to extrapolate the known effects of solar farms that have been set up, and it's also useful to keep in minds the basic laws of thermodynamics -- in other words, are you seriously suggesting that taking out about 20% (the current efficiency of solar cells, though see yesterday's story on newer, more efficient cells) of the solar energy hitting an areas the size of the Mojave Desert would not have such an effect? Really?
Ahh, another clueless theoretician in search of a spherical cow.
First of all, NOBODY literally proposed laying PV over the entirety of the Mojave. But evidently you feel the need to get snitty. So be it.
Listen, Aristotle, it is nothing even resembling "trivial". The relevant thermodymamics are NOT 20% withdrawn versus nothing withdrawn. That, as something like twenty posters on this thread have already explained, starts from the utterly fallacious assumption that otherwise the energy would be "perfectly" and instantly distributed and that only by adding the EEEEVIIL photovoltaics would any redistribution take place.
You wanna get salty? Yeah. It would have an effect. Again as others have pointed out, it would actually be somewhat similar to what would happen if the same area was to be successfully planted and irrigated, a thing that would, in fact be highly desirable. It would cut down on daytime peaks (and, btw, on heat loss to reflection back into space) and provide a helpful insulating "second skin" that would even things out more at night and, in fact, also result in significant condensation out of the air, that could then be put into the ground and would certainly promote plant growth and AGAIN be considered a serious gain.
Have you ever dealt with metal frames or other equipment in the desert? That gives you a good starting point. Shade underneath, some heat absorption, leveling of temperature, moderation of winds. You know, the stuff that settlers to an area reliably try desperately hard to induce.
Now back when I was sitting through the environmental impact hearings that Atlantic Richfield did for their desert region solar installations way back in, was it '78? I was under the impression that the impact of such systems was quite well analyzed and comprehensively, as I have briefly explained above, desirable. Contrary to what you are asserting.
Negative impacts? Sure. The glare (I'm not kidding about this) does no favors at all to predator birds or, for that matter, pilots. There are some others, but the "self-evident" stuff you claim is just so much hogwash. (But what would I know? I only spoke then with biologists with expertise in desert biomes, one of whom went on to become a state regulator.)
(BTW, I'll send a six-pack of brew of choice to the person who tracks down those EIS hearings and finds out what questions I asked of ARCO.)
Yet again, I ask, where are your FACTS? Give me actual cases of photovoltaic installations, active or passive, causing adverse effects on surrounding areas. Power generation *always* involves conversion of energy. Duh! And the amount of thermal impact is primarily proportional to the power generated, not the geographical distribution of the load. This is why the early efforts to "help" by building taller smokestacks and longer effluent pipes are now seen to have been so destructive.
Come back when you have real world data. The rest of us on this thread have made it eminently clear that we do. Pony up or fold.
Frankly, no matter what you respond though, I won't be posting again tonight as I have to prepare for the conference on technological responses to and impacts upon global warming that I am attending tomorrow.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Well and good, except that even with the best photovoltaic technology projected to be available within the foreseeable future, you would need to convert the whole Mojave desert -- and a lot more -- to make a dent in the power needs of the state of California (which is where this discussion began). Indeed, given that there is a specific and finite amount of solar energy hitting the Earth's surface, it is unlikely that terrestrial solar arrays will ever be particularly interesting as an energy source -- do the math.
Nor is the vegetation comparison particularly interesting -- irrigating and planting the whole Mojave would indeed have a massive impact, and even so, photosynthesis is a lot less than 20% efficient.