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Existing Solar Tech Could Power Entire US, Says NREL
derekmead writes "A new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds that solar holds more potential to generate more power (PDF) than any other clean energy source. The NREL broke things down into four groups: urban and rural utility-scale photovoltaics (giant solar plants, basically) as well as rooftop solar and concentrated mirror arrays. Between those technologies, which are all already on the market, the NREL reckons there's a proven potential for solar to hit a capacity of 200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone. For some perspective, 1 gigawatt is what a single nuclear power plant might generate, and it's more than most coal plants. A gigawatt of capacity is enough to power approximately 700,000 homes."
In a capitalist society, abundance is not a feature.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't bother us with your pathetic alternative energies. We have to burn every fucking ounce of long-chain hydrocarbons, use up every ounce of radioactive ore, burn every ounce of methane and other simple hydrocarbon, before we even consider your pathetic green hippy alternative energy sources. Only fags and Commies believe in generating electricity by anything other than CO2-vomiting power plants. Oh, and CO2 is totally harmless, no matter how fucking much of it you puke out.
God bless oil! The only way oil could be better is if I could fuck or eat it! Now get off my lawn, you pathetic Marxist hippies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And we just need to pork a few more billions to the solyndras of the world, too.
We've know for a while that the US receives enough sunlight to provide all the power we need. The problem is the cost of building all that infrastructure. Dealing with the variability of solar power and it's inability to follow load along with providing storage or other renewable sources to provide power at night. I'd also wonder if we have enough rare earth minerals to cover the construction of that many solar panels.
I'd like a $10-trillion hand-out, too.
1 gigawatt is what a single nuclear power plant might generate, and it's more than most coal plants
On the other hand, that's barely enough for one jump back to the future.
I see you've abandoned all attempts to actually discuss alternative power, in favor of just making up stupid shit to say about other people. Well done.
I would welcome better reactors before going straight to $7,000/kwh and covering everything in sight with horribly inefficient pv's.
But I guess I'm just some kind of hate spewing, earth destroying, hyper-religious jackass. Don't mind me.
They throw around some mighty big numbers. I wonder how those numbers look when the sun sets.
Solar is, and will continue to be, nowhere near it's full potential until battery technology catches up.
Solar power will not catch on until you can get a bunch of solar panels and a decent battery together for a price low enough that it's a no brainer to install them. Until then, solar will be limited to the world of rich eco-friendly types.
We just have to burn more than we can pull out of the ground and you'll immediately see prices spike, as governments ration oil to make sure that farms, commerce, and armies get first grabs at it. Personal automobiles may bid up to $10/gallon for whatever's left over.
moox. for a new generation.
I see they forgot to include the total cost.
I think you will find, its more than the planet is worth at this point.
As soon as they perfect algae to diesel, you will be able to get a perfect substitute for diesel fuel. Go ahead, fill up your lifted 4X4, there will be plenty to go around!
More seriously, solar isn't going to substitute for the 160 exajoules provided to the world each year by oil any time soon, and transitioning to a lower energy culture isn't going to be painless. Still, it's better than nothing. Ubiquitous solar on every rooftop and on every building where it made sense would go a long way towards making powerdown less painful.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
With the abundance of gas around the World - especially here in the Good 'Ole US of gassy A - and subquently it being dirt cheap, we won't be seeing market driven adoption of solar for a few decades.
Dinasour farts for the win!
Yeah, because we haven't thrown money at the solar industry just to watch it go up in flames with no ROI.
Sorry, but if you want me to ante up my money I need something better than what we've seen. I have no problem with pulling subsidies from carbon burners but I need a solid solution first and it's just not looking good.
We could just design and build thorium reactors for a lower cost.
They are safe.
They do not take up valuable farm space or displace native creatures and plant life.
The raw materials (silicon and trace elements) are virtually unlimited and highly recyclable, so that's not a problem. The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.
What's the energy input to replace a panel? I do believe it's favorable. In other words, I think it's worthwhile to make the cells whereas ethanol is actualy a net loser. I just don't have numbers. Google time...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Like these so-called scientists know anything. I heard on the radio today that solar energy is baloney and if the radio says it, then that's plenty good enough for me and anybody who says different is obviously biased.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I for one am looking forward to that day when I can see nothing but solar cells. Desert? Heck no, solar cells! Mountains? Nope, amorphous silicon as far as the eye can see.
Not that I think solar's a bad idea, but there's an assertion made in this (stated as if it were a fact) that a gigawatt of electricity is enough to power 700,000 homes which I think may not bear scrutiny.
First, you need more peak energy production with solar than with fossil fuels or nuclear, because you also have to be storing up energy for dark hours/cloudy days.
Second, that sounds like it's estimating some pretty low consumption per household, which probably isn't realistic. Electric consumption per household is on the increase, and I'd expect this to continue. More so if there's a move toward electric/hybrid vehicles recharged at night.
They have tested and proven that "molten salt" can be produced by aiming a field of mirrors at a high tower. The salt is double the temperature of boiling water. It gets stored underground in big tanks or caverns. Then a portion of the heat is used (24 hours a day) to boil water and run a conventional steam turbine hooked up to a conventional generator. The system can run for 3 days with no sunlight.
The NREL broke things down into four groups: urban and rural utility-scale photovoltaics (giant solar plants, basically) as well as rooftop solar and concentrated mirror arrays. Between those technologies, which are all already on the market, the NREL reckons there's a proven potential for solar to hit a capacity of 200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone.
oh great. i guess all we need is the bazillion dollars needed to build and maintain these massive solar arrays.
duh.
What are these cells made of, how long do they last, and how abundant/available are the raw materials needed to produce them?
The math smells. "200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone" has to mean 200,000 gigawatts per hour since it is being compared to a nuke plant generating 1GW, otherwise they instantly fail, am I right? But the first link I hit on google says only 12,211GW of solar energy hits the whole Earth. See the problem? Guess math is hard for greens.
Democrat delenda est
The problem with solar isn't generating enough power. The problem is having enough power STORAGE to sustain us at peak times which just so happen to be when the sun is down. Battery tech, and more importantly battery price, needs to advance before we can go 100% solar
I am very skeptical. Maybe I'll be more convinced when I finish reading the report. But 1) what about when it's dark? 2) there's significant losses when transmitting electricity over long distances. This can be minimized by the use a very-high voltage transmission lines, but that requires greater expense, and bigger, uglier towers. 3) What land use is going to be lost when we have so much of the country covered with solar panels? 4) photovoltaics don't work as well in the heat as the do in the cold. How are you going to fix the problem of their heating? 5) some of the newer technologies use Indium and other rare metals - are these going to become even more scarce? 5) China has killed the PV cell business in the US. 6) wind 7) nuclear
Don't bother us with your pathetic alternative energies. We have to burn every fucking ounce of long-chain hydrocarbons, use up every ounce of radioactive ore, burn every ounce of methane and other simple hydrocarbon, before we even consider your pathetic green hippy alternative energy sources. Only fags and Commies believe in generating electricity by anything other than CO2-vomiting power plants. Oh, and CO2 is totally harmless, no matter how fucking much of it you puke out.
God bless oil! The only way oil could be better is if I could fuck or eat it! Now get off my lawn, you pathetic Marxist hippies.
I'm sure I've been past a few places in the last month where the people are entirely off the grid. I think they are laughing at everyone who doesn't have the luxury of a location suitable for wind or solar, because it really can cut our generated needs. I'm pretty sure at least one was a commune.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yogi, or Smokey?
Spirit and Opportunity were powered by solar panels delivering 140W.
Curiosity, 5 times heavier, has a radionuclide battery delivering 125W.
Despite being much heavier, Curiosity will be faster and more effective than either Spirit or Opportunity.
The difference, of course, is that nuclear power is being delivered constantly, while solar power needs sun shine, varies over the day and depends on weather and season.The 1GW of propaganda power is what you get under ideal conditions - in other words, never. A nuclear power plant rated at 1GW will deliver this and is capable of delivering it for months without a break. On a yearly basis, 1GW in the shape of a nuclear power plant will deliver 10 times as much energy as 1GW of solar power in Germany (about 5 times more for solar power in deserts/arid areas).
And that's without considering the need to store energy from solar power plants in order to use this power when it is needed. Both in terms of the cost in money and energy.
If you compare solar power with anything else in the way this article does, you're deliberately deceiving the readership and nothing else.
What's it like living in an alternate universe where all solar companies are Solyndra?
Wow, the quality of slashdot comments has really declined over the years. Reposting the same canned responses as I can find on any other newsite.
I call bullshit.
The US is 9,826,630 sq km. Sunlight hits the earth @ about 600 W/m^2, or 600e6 W/Km^2.
At 15% conversion efficiency that's 8.843e14 W if the whole US were covered.
To reach 200,000e9 Watts, you would have to cover 22.6% of the entire country with solar cells.
And OTOH: 200,000 GW would also be enough to power 140 billion homes.
I've looked at putting solar panels on my house, and it will cost $30K after tax breaks and credits. The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period. Then they will have to be replaced again. The payback period is roughly 10-12 years, so I'd come out ahead, but I have to make a significant capital purchase and live in the house for over a decade. What happens if I get a new job that requires me to move next year? The $30K investment in the house doesn't raise it's value that amount. For this to work, the payback period will have to drop to 5-6 years, and solar panels will have to be considered a viable option. Geo-thermal heat pumps, vertical wind turbines, efficient appliances, zone cooling and heating, tankless water heaters and (to channel Jimmy Carter) sweaters have more reasonable payback.
"The only way oil could be better is if I could fuck or eat it!"
RealDoll? Edible oil product?
(yes, I know that last one is not petroleum, but... are you sure?)
No, we haven't. And no, Solyndra isn't proof that we have.
The nuclear plant outside Phoenix produces over 3.3 GW. Stating that a nuclear plant "might produce" 1 GW to make your photovoltaic inefficiency sound better is disingenuous at best. Also, last time I checked urban rooftops are already cluttered with equipment, not just sitting there waiting for someone to exploit that real estate, and rural areas are often full of food producing, recreation having, wildlife harboring land. Why you'd want to cover that with vast arrays of shiny glass and metal I can't say. Just remember, all those arrays need plenty of grease, and petroleum products to keep them operational. They'll still result in plenty of pollution of their immediate footprint, which is enormous.
This:
"A new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds that solar holds more potential to generate more power (PDF) than any other clean energy source."
and this:
"The NREL broke things down into four groups: urban and rural utility-scale photovoltaics (giant solar plants, basically) as well as rooftop solar and concentrated mirror arrays."
don't jive. They're leaving out a lot of other technologies such as wind, hydroelectric (micro through major), wood (which is very clean), etc. Solar's great but it's not enough to do everything everywhere. Quite frankly, I don't want to be dependent on far away supplies. Remember OPEC? I like harvesting my own energy as much as possible right here in my backyard.
Solar power towers can store energy efficiently in molten salt and achieve continuous output.
True but how well do they work on a cloudy day? Solar cells will still produce power - albeit less - on a cloudy day. It seems unlikely that this is the case for solar towers.
Actually, unless I messed up the math, this study is saying that the solar technology we have right now could be deployed to easily generate that much power, in the US alone.
Wouldn't it be great if the U.S. started a public works program (not unlike the Hoover Dam project) that provided unemployed Americans jobs building solar/battery systems? Wouldn't that be a fantastic use of taxpayer's dollars? Why isn't that already happening to help out of work Americans?
What if during the housing boom, there was a mandate in place that all new homes had to be built with solar panels? Imagine how much power those acres upon acres of vacant homes around Vegas would be producing right now.
In order for solar to be viable on a large scale, it needs to be mandated by the government and the utilities need to be coerced into allowing homes to feed back into the grid. During the day when people are at work, their homes can be powering their offices. When they are home at night, they can tap traditional power sources such as gas and nuclear.
There will obviously be challenges managing the transition from day to night. Power plants do not just start and stop at the flick of a switch. They will need better control systems to adjust to dynamically shifting loads, both in any given 24 hour cycle, and seasonally.
We have historically high levels of unemployment. The first shots of a major trade war with China have already been fired. We have the Chinese making huge in roads into Africa and the Middle East with an eye on all of the natural resources there. The "cost" of a solar panel is practically irrelevant given the current state of the economy. Rather than pumping billions into the banks and hoping they eventually get around to lending it out, the government could be financing major public works projects. With the right level of tax incentive, we could probably put a solar panel on every private residence in the country within a decade and employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people while doing it.
Of course that will never happen. Between the, "But solar can't do it all." whiners and the "Government spending is bad" whiners, the idea of spending "money" (an artificial concept anyway) to improve the lives of everyone never takes off. Instead we stand here static, whining and crying about how our economy sucks.
A few people have brought up the cost of replacing panels. So what? Is that really an argument? Our entire society is disposable. How often to people replace cars? Tires, brakes? Windows on their homes? Clothes? Cellular phones? If only we had the ability to manufacture things.... Oh wait, we do. What the fuck do you think an "economy" is? You make things that society needs. That's the whole fucking point! You find something society needs, you train people to produce it, those people earn a paycheck, that paycheck enables them to buy things, those things need to be made by other people... those other people buy other things....
It is not enough that the next energy source can replace oil. The next energy source must beat oil in terms of $/KWh. Only then will people switch.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
cause every year, the case for solar/wind/geothermal/conservation gets stronger, and the case for strip mining the western US and Alberta CA tar sands gets weaker.
Every year, the naysayers have to retreat from their prev pathetic arguments to new, even more pathetic arguments (..sun doesn't shine in hte night. As paul krugman says, if you think I've made a simple obvious error, your are probably wrong..)
I wonder, 10 years from, if a single solitary naysayer will actually admit that they were, over many years, loudly and vociferously wrong...
Not necessary.
When we burn more than is being produced, the prices spikes. As soon as the overall economy is spending more than it can afford it contracts, reducing demand and the price falls.
All but of the recessions after WWII coincided with an oil price spike. Just look at any recent graph of the oil price and any market indicator.
John Michael Greer calls it "catabolic collapse."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Hydro is not without cost. Impounding rivers behind dams can destroy spawning habitat, destroy existing fish populations, flood wildlife habitat, and diminish water quality for downstream users. Low-head hydro contributed to the decline of Atlantic Salmon populations in North America.
It sounds so good, but it's not nearly that simple.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Let me guess....You didn't open up that first PDF link in which they did just what you said?
As america fills its space with all these crappy subdivision style homes...
Start requiring X square foot of solar panel for every Z of roof square foot.
3 way split. Power company, homebuilder, and goverment. They all want the money and or the power. They can split the costs of putting these in.
Powercompany/Homeowner gets to be in charge of maint. Eventual replacement costs get picked up by goverment/power company.
Treat it much like an electric meter is now.
One medium mcmansion subdivision could power a small city.
Now do the same to all the big box stores with the nice flat roofs to work on.... We could have solar all over the fucking place and not use up one bit of 'extra' land.
but its expensive, and hard, and fuckit we're making a killing. so we're not gonna do it. lets goto war again instead.
Big Coal is already dead. Natural gas is replacing/hasreplaced it. Fraking may turn out to be a terrible mistake, but for the time being it's powering a massive change.
Of course, trim up your tin hat and indulge in the conspiracy theories that have this as a way to crush the existing coal barons and replace them with a new set. Gasification would be cool if it worked and was cheap enough.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So how many meters is it going to power Washington State in the winter?
a fully solar society would have to start doing things like intelligent street lighting, or traffic lights that only illuminate to indicate stops.
it might be neat to see what kind of impact it has on global trade as well, considering third shift anything could become difficult or conversely more expensive than daytime manufacturing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yes, as coal accounted for 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 I can clearly see how big coal is totally "dead".
Given Washington state's feed in tariff establish until 2020 it's still economical to install solar panels. Looking at the whole year it's still a better deal than the power company. And it's not as if the solar panels don't produce any power in Winter.
If you want some real numbers from a solar system in the area take a look here; http://view2.fatspaniel.net/PV2Web/merge?view=PV/standard/Simple&eid=299424
Now we just need to convince the sun to shine all night. Oh, wait. That's impossible... Ok, better idea, we just store the energy in our cheap, tiny superbatteries. Yes, that will totally work.
I thought transmission losses went up when it is hot, maybe the power companies could put solar in their power-line easements and somehow "top up" the voltage as it drops along the power line run.
Nullius in verba
FYI, the total power output of the world is only about 2500 GW, as opposed to their "potential" energy generation estimate of 200,000 GW, which made me start to question this. Specifically, I checked into their assumptions regarding rural power generation. They quote a potential area for use in solar power generation in Texas of around 450,000 km^2. The total area of the state is about 700,000 km^2. So, unless I'm misreading, they would propose to cover roughly 64% of the entire state in solar panels. That's simply not feasible, given that much of the land is used for things like crops, improvements, wilderness, etc.
This isn't to say that I don't believe that solar power is a viable alternative, but the quoted numbers in this study just don't seem to add up.
>>covering everything in sight with horribly inefficient pv's.
Inefficient? The input -- solar radiation -- is FREE. I don't give a shit how much my panels actually convert to electricity. I'm not paying for the fuel source.
Perhaps some math nerd here can calculate THAT (cost of sunlight to electricity produced) efficiency, but I'm pretty sure it approaches infinity.
You are in essence saying that a clothesline is inefficient. It's the same scenario. I buy the clothesline and string it up; the heat is free. It doesn't matter if it's hot & sunny and everything is dry in an hour, or if it's cloudy and it takes all afternoon. Still free drying. Sunlight requires no mining, drilling, transport, refining, or Wall Street monkeying. I could go on, but that should be enough to make you feel stupid. Same goes for anyone who falls into "solar is only x% efficient" trap. If I had my tinfoil hat on, I'd suspect it was Big Oil propaganda. Conversion efficiency doesn't matter when your fuel cost is zero.
Financially, my worst-case ROI scenario for home solar is a 10-year break-even, and that's assuming the cost of electricity will not rise, which is a laughable notion. It will probably double or worse in 10 years due to all the new carbon tax BS coming down the pike.
At this point, anyone who has the cash laying around and owns his house should get PV, or he's a fool. A better, smaller investment would be solar water heating. Better yet, buy a $5 clothesline and watch how far your utility bill drops.
Where is the power to *MAKE* the chemicals, and *MAKE* the photovoltaics going to come from?
We will expend all the fossil-fuels on Earth just to create the solar panels to save the world!
No explanations and no cites. This is bullshit.
Summertime Pheonix could use PVs for AC. This has to
be the easiest target of all. Every afternoon, when demand
is highest the, output is at max. If it is cloudy, you do not
get as much, but not as much is needed. Taking a hack out
of peak demand is an extraordinary usefull thing to do.
Unfortunately base line power is REQUIRED and is costly
to get right %99.99 of the time. OK - can we agree to
get started tomorrow?
Since you obviously have no clue about economics lets break this down for you. Current searching on Google for the cheapest solar power per watt is about $1 per watt. Now the solar capacity is 200,000 gigawatts so take $1 times 200,000 billion and you are left with a number far greater than any person or government could hope to have. Now lets take a high estimate that the total money in the whole world would be $100 trillion. We don't even have enough money if everyone in the world put money towards it to fund this project, and why let the US have free energy at the expense of the world. Not to mention how much land mass would have to be taken up for this? You already have the environmental nut jobs crying foul at solar in the Mohave desert, what would they do if you cover all of Texas with these, oh never mind they might like that because it will get rid of the reddest state. Actually the US should follow France and build more Nuclear power plants, but oh yeah Americans get scared over any little thing that might hurt them so radiation is so scary. If you actually would open your ears you would see that oil is for transportation, and nuclear for electricity. It's about proven technologies and not pumped up pipe dreams. Once Solar efficiency gets to be economically feasible you will se the so called "Oil Lovers" start wanting solar because after all if you can charge everyone for something that doesn't cost you besides for initial investment, what person with money wouldn't jump on that to "keep the poor down."
So how you use a little bit of your brain and realize that the "alternative energies" sector is just a way for a particular political party to launder money without the public knowing. Can we say Solandra? These are just scare tactics to get/keep power and everyone likes to play into the propaganda.
Unbelievably there are parts of the world where using a clothesline is illegal. Bizarre!
Solar grass? I want to plug my lawn into by house and generate power.
Micro-hydro does not require impounding rivers, destroy spawning habitat or existing fish populations, flood wildlife habitat, diminish water quality, etc. Please educate yourself.
Additionally, solar is not without its cost. Solar covers vast amounts of land and is simply not feasible in many climates due to too much cloud cover and snow cover. Please be sure to come shovel off the 14' of snow on the collectors if you think otherwise.
The report states there is a shitload of area that could be used for solar in the USA? Wow, nice.
With 3750 TWh billed in 2010 for the entire country and PVWatts estimating a 4kw solar installation in Atlanta to provide 5381 Kwh for the year,
we would need 697 million of these installations.
With 125 million houses currently in the country, that would give 18% if we did everyone's house. At today's costs of $4000 per 4kw system (installation not included) that would be $600 billion.
Regardless of the interesting numbers, it looks like this will be used to recommend large scale (read utility/govt) projects,
as they are touted as having the largest capacity.
This will insure your electricity is controlled and priced at market rates by someone that is not you.
If everyone ate cabbage and onions we could fart our way out of this energy problem too.
**could** means diddly squat. I live in the SE USA. We have 250 cloudy days annually and average wind speed is 3 mph. Northwest of here has lots of hydro-electric power, but most of that goes towards government labs. Perhaps 1 out of 1,000 homes has solar panels. When I see them, I immediately think "idiot."
On Tuesday, we had some voting here. On one of the partisan ballets there was a proposal for the state to give tax credits for deploying alternate energy solutions. This is politically smart, but from an engineering perspective, extremely dumb. More raw science is needed to make solar power viable on cloudy days. When that is commercially viable, I'm all in, but at this stage we don't want to encourage the idiots.
Alternative energy means nuclear. There are 5 nuclear power plants with 280 miles from my home, but none are closer than 150 miles. I am not concerned.
I am more worried about drinking water and traffic issues than power generation.
So, I promise to do my part - I'll have a cabbage and onion stew tomorrow and the following 5 days to get the natural gas output we all need to fart our way out of this crisis.
Do your part too!
It's spelled "smart meters", which allow the payment of differential rates for electricity from the grid vs. electricity to the grid. In California, it's already the case that if you generate more electricity than you consume, you don't get paid for it.
One of the reason smart meters are getting installed everywhere is that the power companies are running scared of owning a bunch of wires they have to maintain, and ending up with a net zero profit due to local generating capacity, like wind and solar.
Without the government subsidies, and as some posters have said, a willingness to consider it a long term investment by being able/happy to live in one spot for decades, it's a net loss.
Saccharine came from coal tar and I believe some pharmaceuticals come from oil derivatives.
Micro-hydro as in low-head hydro? Same problems, different scale. Siting is everything. I know a bit about hydro power, watching the Bangor Dam on the Penobscot river fade away.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is a bungled one. I guarantee it. Not only is it a faked statistic, but it's pretty much a lie. One natural disaster, and there goes your solar panel. Wind, hail, and in Louisiana (where I live) and across the Gulf Coast - Hurricanes. So no, we couldn't be powered by solar, for the reason that not only is it too expensive, but it's not very efficient.
I don't know about that clothesline analogy. To work, clotheslines would have to be $100/ft, you'd need enough acreage to dry the same amount of clothing in the same amount of time, and work in the costs of all of the above including maintenance (property tax).
And your worst case break-even is well over 10 years, even if you live in the desert. I guarantee you that.
When I hear discussion about powering the US with renewable energy but see innefficient energy usage it sounds like morbidly obese people discussing the newest buffet in town.
new letter/phrase: hex-u means "www"
That title got cut off. It was supposed to continue "...until the sun goes down." We still need to have the technology to store it well enough, which we don't. Giant, spinning, magnetically levitated, superconductor-based electromagnetically-driven balls in a vacuum is the best we can do at the moment for efficiency and a very expensive plant can supply a relatively pathetic amount of energy for like 20 minutes. I'm not kidding either, someone built a prototype (as seen on slashdot)
Inefficient? The input -- solar radiation -- is FREE. I don't give a shit how much my panels actually convert to electricity. I'm not paying for the fuel source.
Just wait until solar energy really catches on and use of coal and natural gas drop off. Then the government, seeing their tax revenues for these energy sources drying up, will start taxing sunlight. So much for your free fuel.
varies based on the size of the pool of salt.
Actually it varies based on the rate of heat flow from the salt. This is a function of the temperature, insulation and shape of the salt as well as the overall mass. However my question was more related as to whether the mirrors can collect enough light and infrared from a diffuse source to actually provide enough heating power to melt the salt and be useful.
Thing is, that $5 clothesline pays for itself within a week or so. Our clothesline lasted 10 years. Your PV panels pay for themselves in about 30 years, and in the meantime need maintanance, replacement batteries (not cheap) for storage at least once during the cycle, and become less efficient as time goes on.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yeah, I'd like to see some citations about how we've thrown a ton at solar too! One company failing isn't nearly enough evidence. They were given a drop in the bucket and the Chinese subsidies have been killing us, tariffs should supposedly even that out...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Seriously someone said reckon...Abe Lincolon would be proud.
Oddly enough, my oil boiler was made in a factory powered by solar energy. ;)
I've looked at installing solar panels. Of course I live far enough north that the front of my house has a better angle than the roof(I'd need an very steep roof to get to a good angle).
We have expensive power up here; but federal subsidies aren't quite enough to make installing the panels worth it. I'm looking into installing solar hot water for the summer; but haven't found anything 'good enough' yet.
I don't read AC A human right
Salt has a heat of fusion of 30 kJ/mol, allowing molten salt to store quite a bit of energy.
Washington State (and Oregon where I live) have the advantage of lots of hydropower. Also we have plenty of wind power. We won't need to depend on solar panels as much as some other areas of the country. East of the Cascade Mountains it's pretty dry, they get plenty of sun and there's lots of room for solar panels.
If only the opponents of alternative energy were as thoughtful and logical as you, we might have a chance to save the earth. its voices like yours that i really miss, in the current discourse. We have fallen so far off the cliff, Nixon is starting to look like a demigod of virtue, and i bet even Hitler and Mussolini would have a better perspective on the energy crisis than the current crop of neanderthals. thanks for the rant, its rather cheering.
What you leave out of your analysis is how long it will take to install all of that solar power. If you spread $200 billion over 40 years it's only $5 billion per year. Also you can expect solar prices to drop even more as production is ramped up so the cost gets cheaper over time anyway.
$5 clothsline; Heck, Let's go with a $25 clotheline setup (line, pins, maybe a pole or two).
Average dryer cost: 3 kwh(Saw figures between 2.7 and 4). Kwh cost: 10 cents. Savings: 30 cents per load. After 83 loads, you've broken even, even if you keep the dryer. That's 14 weeks to break even at 6 loads a week. I'll note that some might not like clothelines because it DOES require more labor. Value your time at $10/hour and line drying takes an additional 15 minutes of work for the hanging? That's $2.50 to 'save' 30 cents. Just keep this stuff in mind. 30 cents is less than 2 minutes of work at that 'wage rate'. Personal feelings about the 'feel' of line dried clothing may change things(I think line dried tends to be 'stiff').
Next up would be solar thermal heating - tends to havea 5 year payoff because the panels/install tends to be so much cheaper. A bit more limited, but it can knock off one of the top 3 energy consumers in the house.
I don't read AC A human right
Lame to rely to myself but I have to add:
How much of that $1/Watt would you have spent on fossil fuel power sources. The increment in your cost over what you pay for current energy is way less than $1.
One could point out while a coal fired plant is small, the amount of land consumed by mining in order to feed it, is not small.
Another fun fact, U325 has orders of magnitude more energy per pound than coal. Yet, work backwards, Only 0.7% of Uranium is U325. And ores only contain a percent or so. And you can only burn up a few percent in a reactor before you need to reprocess. In the end the ore contains more energy per pound than coal, but not quite as much as people assume.
Dependance on far-away supplies? The sun is pretty far away.
I'm a proponent of nuclear power and I'm a bit skeptical about the practicality of renewables in the short term, but I believe that in the long run solar is going to dominate the energy scene. The amount of energy the Earth recieves from the sun is staggering, and the amount of solar energy we could generate if we created huge sun-orbiting solar power plants is pretty much unimaginable in modern terms (the sun outputs enough energy to sustain a population of 24 trillion billion humans at present rates of consumption). As such, I have no doubt that we will one day be able to meet our basic needs using solar power. It would be conservative to predict that eventually we will be drawing in massively more energy from solar power than we consume today from all sources.
In particular though, solar is the most direct and efficient power source that does not suffer from Jevons Paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If we perfected fission and fusion power, we'd simply amp up our power usage massively. Cheaper energy means we can afford to do more with it. Suborbital commuter flights? Launching city-sized spacecraft? Colonizing the solar system and maintaining the colonies with regular shipments of supplies? Not a problem...but with such massive energy consumption, we'd eventually face yet another energy crisis. Although it may seem rediculous now, supplies of easily obtainable, high yield fusion and fission fuel would probably be depleted to worrying levels within the timeframe of a human lifetime.
This doesn't apply to the sun. You can't mine the sun, it's simply too hot. Plus, it's already a fantastic fusion power plant, so there's no need to try it. The only "downside" is that the sun has a production limit, which is fairly stable and not easily increased. However, this is really a blessing in the long run as we can't consume more than what the sun gives off in a given time period, leading to long-term stability. Therefore solar is the only notable power source in the long run.
That said, non-solar nuclear still has an important place. In the short term, fission can help reduce our reliance on coal during the gap between fossil fuels and solar. In the medium term, nuclear has an important place in space colonization and turning the sun into a giant fusion power plant. In the long run, it may still have a place as a high-density energy storage medium. The point here is that the energy we use doesn't just vanish. What we make out of it can have a big impact. We wouldn't have gotten to the point where we could make the leap to nuclear and solar without fossil fuels...or at the very least it would have taken much longer to get where we are now. The use of "consumable" nuclear power will jumpstart our next big push.
Now if only we could store enough of it to provide continuously variable supply, at a competitive price...
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/08/01/walmart-celebrates-100th-california-solar-installation/
Walmart is profitably putting solar panels on a lot of their stores. Solar panel costs keep coming down year after year. It's pretty exciting to see this happen. Note USA massively under invests in techinology research.
use up every ounce of radioactive ore
That should keep you busy for a couple million years. Radioactive ore can be found all over the place in our solar system, and the galaxy.
(Radioisotopes are not hydrocarbons. I got the impression MightyMartian despite meaning their post as a joke, was confused by that.)
The only way oil could be better is if I could fuck or eat it!
Plastics, cooking oils and food additives. They also keep your precious bodily fluids pure (bottled water, syringes, pills, etc.).
Ideally, I'd want *ALL* of them to win to some extent. I like having diversified electricity generation sources.
I don't read AC A human right
And solar is currently looking at 30% and that's world average. California can manage better than 40% today.
France lose ALL nuclear power two summers ago because the river water wasn't able to remove enough waste heat from the power stations drawing from it.
The rover doesn't produce much energy, so no cooling required. And it doesn't care about waste products damaging the environment. And compared to commercial power stations even, the price per GW is huge.
When the very first solar company stated they were going bankrupt, their entire operation should have been taken and given to the public gratis.
But no it was torn apart and sold as scrap. There's one problem right there. We paid for them in taxes, and subsidies but when it came time to repay the public, we got the middle finger. With subsidization the power companies end up with the inventory, not the people. Look at all these power companies who brag they are all "goin solar" "goin green" all of them subsidized. And again the public gets the middle finger. Oh but it lowers operating costs at the power company. Yeah right. Yet with all their bragging and boasting power cost has gone up.
If you want solar, just go do it. The cockroaches running our government aren't going to make it any easier. Since everyone else is a scumbag trying to get something for nothing you might as well look for the same. If you are worried about 30 years of panels and batteries and inverters for $30,000 then grid feed solar probably isn't for you. Quit arguing about the money the banksters and their oath breaking officials already stole more than that from you.
For less than $500 you can grab a couple modules and batteries, wire, and inverters and then go play. Who knows maybe you can do all your lighting, or charge all your batteries for all of your communications. Maybe each year you add more panels?
I;m going to be honest, I don't like living under a bunch of battery powered led lights (even candles come close to the same light), my eyesight sucks really bad under regular lights, but.... if the power went out, I would be better off than most with 50 watts being tapped off into a battery each day, to play with. I say, "play" , but when the grid goes down it's called being prepped. It's no joke look at India recently.
ya know all those beans, gold and guns people you made the jokes about
shag an entire Olympic pool of synchronized swimmers...
given enough time, money (and Viagra).
There's a couple problems remaining. I'm not sure I can describe it well, but I'll try.
The problem you have is risk and inflation. With inflation you have that present money is worth more than future money. Solar panels(and other green tech) suffer from the problem that they require great big up-front investments of capital; in many cases such that I can invest the money that would go into a solar install and more than pay my utility bills off the proceeds.
With risk, you have this big up front cost for something that might not last 25 years. Sure, it's warranteed, but ask yourself this: What happened to the warranties for the Soyndra panels that did get sold? Will the solar company still be around? Will you be able to prove that you're covered by the warranty? Will they honor it(or did they declare bankruptcy and write off the warranties 5 years ago)? Also, damage is typically not covered, and a lot can happen in 25 years - sure, they're rated for hail, but what if you get unlucky and it gets busted anyways? What if there's a house fire? Somebody outright *steals* them to feed their meth habit?
That's all risk, and and as a result, logical people will discount the savings in some way to account for said risk. How much they do so depends on their individual assessment and tolerance.
I don't read AC A human right
With current tech pries, what is that. Soemthing like $100 trillion to build that infrastructure?
When solar panel efficiencies triple and prices drop 50%, then everyone will install them. Till then though, it is for tech nerds that ignore the economic reality of it.
When the food chain collapses the demand for power will be dramatically reduced.
Just wait for it.
However, the number of households are trending up. I'd also like to see on that graph the number of occupants(is it going down?). While I know the population has been trending up.
Hmm... 1980 - 227M, 2.8 people per house. 1997 - closer to 2.7.
Minor, but still there. Still, it reminds me - saving energy takes increasing amounts of 'effort/expense'. IE it might cost X to cut your energy usage in half. To cut it in half again (using 25% the original energy) might cost 10X. Once you knock out the 'easy kills' like shutting the lights off when you're not in the room, you have to spend money to get better lights. Once you have the better lights, you need better appliances, then better windows, then more insulation in the roof/walls, then to get below that you're looking at having to specially design the house itself.
I don't read AC A human right
1. Who's going to pay for this? I can't afford $40,000+ for solar panels, batteries, and electric redesign on my home.
2. Uh oh, I live in the woods. Someone going to make me cut down my trees?
3. Uh oh, my shingles will need to be replaced in a few years. Crap, they're buried under these panels.
4. Hey, it's snowing out. Honey, are the lights dimming?
We do a lot better with non photovoltaic generation with molten salt.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
yes. it's a serious deficiency of all these "green" energy systems (with the exception of wave/tidal which has its own problems: hurricanes).
i loved hearing the story about how denmark has a fantastic wind farm, but of course the wind is unpredictable. so they sell the power to norway, which has hydro-electric plants, at a considerable discount. what do the norwegians do? using the power from denmark, they pump the water *back* up the reservoirs. then, of course, denmark runs into a power deficiency problem, so what do they do? they buy power *back* from norway - at a considerable markup of course.
you certainly can't use batteries, not even lead-acid. i did the maths once on the quantity of lead required to store 24MWh, i think it came out at something insane like 10,000 tonnes of lead. and that would just be for a 24hr backup supply of 1MW.
water or salt on the other hand is in massive abundant supply. hell, with wind farms you could even just heat the salt up with a highly-efficient electric heater. it's got to be better than wasting the power. you know what they do at the moment, don't you? in order to make the wind farms *look* like they're being used, they *BACK-FEED* them during the times when wind speed is below the operating threshold (which is quite high: 8m/sec - about 25mph). below 8m/sec the gearing on wind turbines simply isn't enough to generate the voltages.
Lab whose entire existence depends on solar energy says solar energy is better than sex!
Making pure silicon requires alot of energy; however, the actual byproducts of the process are harmless salts.
The intermediate chemicals get re-distilled over and over. Silicon dioxide and salts are the two main waste products.
Do people who write this crap have ANY idea how a power grid works? It would cause massive fluctuations in the grid due to the cyclic and unreliable power provided by solar. You would HAVE to back it up with stable and static Nuclear and Fuel powered plants. You could reduce your reliance.. but to think you could supply all your needs? Waves of brownouts and blackouts.
I sometimes think about this when Solar is brought up, because the effects to me aren't as obvious, but whenever solar is talked about, people say a benefit is we're using the sun's renewable energy instead of using a finite amount of energy found in the earth, as if there is almost infinite energy from the sun. I'm not sure I agree with this. Yes we can measure oil right now but to think we have infinite solar energy I think is short-sighted. Of course I could be wrong.
What I'm trying to get at is, the sun transmits a certain amount of sunlight to the earth a day (Wiki is quoted as saying 174 Petawatts). About 30% of that gets reflected back into space. Sweet. But the Earth has been used to having that other 70% naturally, for plants, animals, weather. If we were to only harness that 30%, great (Cause...fuck space!). But how much energy can we steal from our closed system of earth before we start to see it in local flora and fauna? In weather patterns? Obviously with a scale of 174 Petawatts it isn't a concern right now, but couldn't it be a concern some day? If you know this is already answered, I'd gladly check it out, I'm curious what studies have been done for this. I guess my point is, there's also a potential negative effect for Solar that can't be ignored forever. Or can it?
What taxes are there on coal or natural gas use?
Yeah, I'm sure there are taxes on the sale of coal. But then there are taxes on the sale of solar panels, too.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Once again, failing to grasp the context. Coal is effectively dead. We're sitting on zombie fleet of dirty, inefficient crap that will not be replaced. The industry is running these plants into the ground rather than modernizing them. There is no money in coal. The EPA is presently scheduled to shutdown some 74 GW of coal. AKA 1/3. 1/3 more will fall apart by 2020 and you'll see coal less than wind and solar by 2025. Gas will make up 75% of the load while wind and solar and perhaps nuclear fight for the scraps, of course no nuke plants will even be finished construction by then...
MightyMartian was not confused. MightyMartian states clearly that hydrocarbons are the best, because puking unlimited amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere to prove those fucking hippies wrong is what America is all about. Insatiable appetites coupled with absolute and unassailable certain in our God-given right to do whatever the fuck we want is the American Way!
Sure, uranium is a decent substitute, but it's a little hippy-ish, because it involves scientists, and we all know some of them are fucking hippies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Here at the University of Washington, our tech patent group holds many solar patents, ranging from biofilm solar you can wrap on cars to large building tech systems.
I know it's cloudy here, but the solar radiation level is around 80 percent virtually all year round (the clouds mostly drizzle and keep in the heat).
The main problem is payoff over time. Return on Investment (ROI) is higher for passive solar technology - e.g. hot water heating and similar methods, which can then be used to heat/cool buildings or store energy. Storage is expensive for other techs, depending on which of the many battery technologies you use.
A particular problem for us here is that hydroelectricity is very cheap here, although that does allow us to run the 2nd most green campus in the USA.
Remember, 40 percent of energy consumption in the US is just for one thing: heating and cooling buildings. Moving more of that to technologies such as solar - given that people tend to be at work during daylight hours - would be the most effective. The next largest group is for transportation - economies of scale make combined solar/wind storage in fuel cells for large vehicles attractive - both for trains, which could be refueled along their lines, and for large trucks. Smaller vehicles are much less efficient, and have less of an impact - more efficient engines that get 60-100 mpg and, in areas with cheap non-coal non-oil electricity, electric vehicles that can be charged passively using variable sources at work or home (plug-in electric) are a good use.
Can we adapt? Yes. Is it the most efficient method? Depends on what you're talking about and where you are, quite frankly.
But in almost all cases, passive solar usage for heating and cooling water and managing internal lighting is a good choice and could be implemented now with a good ROI.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Suuuuuuure it could. Keep telling yourself that.
Oh wait, is this a sales driving tactic? Never mind.
Dunno where you live, but around here, the government *pays* oil and gas companies. They don't get any revenue from them, these companies pay negative taxes (that means they get refunds). So...I'll dance a jig in my front yard the day the government sees their "revenues" "dry up" from oil and gas.
There are taxes on the electricity produced from the gas and coal. With solar panels at least some of the power will be produced at the point of consumption with no utility company or governmental agency involved, hence no taxes.
It's similar in concept to the states that are realizing the shift to electric vehicles will hit them hard in the gas tax pocket so they're making moves to shift to a tax on the miles driven regardless of the power source of the vehicle.
To say they will tax sunshine is somewhat euphemism. They'll actually find a way to tax the electricity generated by the solar panels on your roof.
If pretty much the entire rural US was covered in solar panels, yes.
From the PDF (Notice the absence of 'Area currently in use for producing food'):
Land Type(s) Exclusion:
Urban Areas
MRLC - Water
MRLC - Wetlands
BLM ACEC Lands (Areas of Critical Environmental Concern) (BLM 2009)
Forest Service IRA (Inventoried Roadless Area) (USFS 2003)
National Park Service Lands
Fish & Wildlife Lands
Federal Parks
Federal Wilderness
Federal Wilderness Study Area
Federal National Monument
Federal National Battlefield
Federal Recreation Area
Federal National Conservation Area
Federal Wildlife Refuge
Federal Wildlife Area
Federal Wild and Scenic Area
It would practically defund the Republicans. From which one might project that Republican support for the idea would be less than enthusiastic.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
GM would have gone bankrupt without the bailout, does that mean that all car companies are failures?
Isn't Velveeta an edible oil product?
The most common one I've seen mentioned is reverse pumping of water for hydroelectric systems, and store it as a gravity gradient.
There are also compressed air storage systems, such as the recent salt-dome one recently announced for Texas (not a real project until they break ground, IMO).
But you're right, you hit a wall at a pretty low capacity/usage ratio.
Because Congress will regulate it to death so the oil companies, coal coal companies, and other big energy companies will keep paying them to protect their business interests.
It seems to me that a lot of the discussion/arguments around renewable energy tech, esp solar, revolve around whether it will be the complete solution. Wouldn't it be worth pursuing solar electricity generation on a massive scale, even if it "only" supplied 50% - 80% of what we needed? If solar was installed on *all* new residential and commercial buildings and say, 50-70% of existing buildings were retro-fitted, wouldn't that move the planet significantly away from oil dependencies and jump start the engineering and cultural changes that will *have* to embrace at some point. Doing something like would provide the real world lab to improve the technology and inspire new ideas. It's always going to be an iterative process.
We can't wait around for "perfect" solutions. Sure it's not smart do rush into something with a small payoff but it looks like we've reached a point where at least 2 or 3 energy technologies are well worth implementing on a global scale now.
Given a home of about 1500sqft, how much would it take in terms of solar panels to run an air-conditioning unit that keeps said house relatively cool.
How about the same for your average shopping mall, grocery store, etc?
If it's affordable, then that's a nice start right there. We run into nasty grid issues during heatwaves, and overall power consumption tends to go up with the summer temperatures, so why not start by stabilizing the grid against that and more from there
The depletion of energy from barrier conditions like conduction and convection diminish in relation to the storage capacity with the increase in volume and mass of the salt. If you prefer, "more salt holds heat better, unless you put it in a sheet or thread - but nobody involved is that dumb."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, please, please go learn about this before you talk more. It's really interesting stuff. You can do micro-hydro with high-head/low-volume, low-head/high-volume, in-stream, low-output, etc. Lots of options. It has nothing to do with what you're thinking. Micro-hydro can be small enough for a single home off of a spring. No fish were harmed in the making of this. Go learn more about micro-hydro rather than spurting miss-information. Micro-hydro is very environmental friendly.
The real point you're missing is that each technology has its place. That was my point.
like Donald explained I am dazzled that any one can profit $4269 in four weeks on the internet. did you see this web link http://goo.gl/UUZFR
http://co2isgreen.org/ ...So according to this, anyone belching lots of planet saving C02 must be a commie, tree-hugging hippy!
Stop the damn dirty hippies, use solar power!