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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.
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.
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.
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.
Solar power towers can store energy efficiently in molten salt and achieve continuous output.
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?
I just bought some land for some serious off grid living. So I have been looking at solar and wind power for my little get away place. I have found that the power generation systems have come down to an affordable price point, but the storage tech still needs significant improvement, and needs to come down in price a long way.
I will be keeping a small backup gas generator for quite a while I expect.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
They throw around some mighty big numbers. I wonder how those numbers look when the sun sets.
Even without storage, having that power to tap during daytime hours when businesses and homes need it most would be very helpful. I imagine that demand is most high when it's hottest (for AC), which would also be when this technology performed best.
Until then, solar will be limited to the world of rich eco-friendly types.
Not if the government/utilities build it. And hey - you already pay a massive premium for on-peak power, I bet there is funding for this in there somewhere..
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
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.
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.
"Solar is, and will continue to be, nowhere near it's full potential until battery technology catches up."
You appear to be ignorant of the many other forms of grid energy storage which are available. Also, electrical energy could be converted to other useful forms, such as hydrogen, to replace existing hydrocarbon uses.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
yes, algae fuels would help the petroleum fuel shortage. Particularly Botryococcus braunii: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botryococcus_braunii - but there are far better solutions generating electricity.
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.
That 12,000 GW of energy is -per square mile-. Multiply by 197 million for total potential solar.
http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth.html
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.
Might want to look into methane digester if you have a few animals (cattle, sheep, chickens, etc) around on your off grid place.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
has to mean 200,000 gigawatts per hour
Oh my. I really hope this was a troll, but I'm going to bite anyway. If not, know that you are in good company; most people struggle with the idea that watts already include "per unit of time". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
Of course, this is from the same person that wishes the power company would stop using kilowatt-hours to report my electricity usage and start using kilo/mega/gigajoules.
That being said, you may have some legitimate arguments if you have the units straightened out.
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?
You're only considering solar panels on individuals' houses. We don't all use diesel generators all the time, so why would solar have to be locally installed?
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.
Yeah, there is no fucking way you're getting that much power out of existing solar tech. I'm embarrassed I had to scroll down this far on /. to see someone questioning those laughable numbers. They've got to be off by several orders of magnitude.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You are looking at it the wrong way. The problem is that we take power so much for granted that we judge any alternative power by whether or not it is capable of running all our 100w bulbs, or letting us boil water at 2 AM, rather than use the power when it is available. Why dont we try thinking outside the box and store the hot water instead? Who's houses lighting requirements couldn't be fulfilled by a single charged lead acid battery these days? Why do you need so much power after dark anyway, can't you live without your iron?
Replying to myself. Never trust a green website. Just did my own math. The amount of energy hitting the ground averages 1361 Watts per square meter. US peak electrical generation in the summer (which happens to be peak sunshine) needs 1017GW. So my math says 747 square kilometers receive that much energy. So if you could cover that much territory 100% (and get the greens to allow totally darkening that much sky) and achieve 100% conversion (not!) then you could power the US entirely with solar. Discounting the need to have some way to power us at night since there wouldn't be any spare capacity to store.
So since you aren't likely to get anywhere near even 50% efficency on the conversion and you will need to allow some light past lets multiply the area needed by ten. So an 86x86 kilometer square would be a good starting point for powering the current US grid. Reality would probably need to at least double that again. So the questions are two:
1. In what alternate reality will the greens allow paving over that much of the Earth?
2. Anyone care to guess how much in dollars, labor and natural resources would be involved in such an epic project?
Democrat delenda est
I sum up 192,922 GW total from the NREL study.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight) says there's 1.361 KW per square meter of solar irradiance. This would serve as an upper bound, since solar panels are not 100% efficient, but should prove the point.
Wikipedia also says the United States is 9,826,675 square kilometers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states). One square kilometer is 1,000,000 square meters, giving 9,826,675,000,000 square meters for the United States.
9,826,675,000,000 square meters * 1.361 kW/square meter = 13,374,104,675,000 kW theoretical maximum. That's 13,374,104 GW.
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
That's a nonsensical phrase unless you're discussing a change in power over time (such as, "every hour, power rises by x gigawatts"). You could say gigawatt-hours (GWh), which is a unit of energy, or you could say gigawatt-hours per hour (GWh/h), shortened to gigawatts (GW), which is a unit of power. It all depends on what you mean. But I don't think you really mean gigawatts per hour.
No, it says 12,211 GWh per day of solar energy hits one square mile.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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?
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.
Or use something better than 15%. Solar thermal is more like 50%, which brings your area down to less than 7%. And as you point out, 200,000 GW is ridiculously over the top.
The sun facing disk is the right area. If you count the total area, you have to multiply by the sine of the incident angle. In short, reducing the large area to the flat disk.
> Why do you need so much power after dark anyway, can't you live without your iron?
1. Electric cars. Don't we still want those? Or did a miss a meeting?
2. Climate control. Here where I live the outside temp can stay above the typical AC setting 24/7. In other places it gets frickin cold at night.
3. So you want us running the washer/dryer during the day, at peak load time? Jeeze.
4. Many industrial operations go 24/7.
Democrat delenda est
Well, there's a terrific technology for storing that daytime solar energy that works as long as solar provides less than 50% of your electricity. Best of all the infrastructure to use it is *already* in place.
It's called unburned fossil fuels.
You simply shut that old oil burning plant during the day, leaving that bunker oil it would have burned in the tank. The result is up to a 50% reduction in pollution (including carbon footprint), and reduced price pressure on dwindling petroleum supplies.
Granted, as electric car technology becomes common, and if those cars rely on home charging stations, then UBFF might become less attractive. But it will take us a long, long time to get solar generation capacity to the same order of magnitude as oil, coal and natural gas combined. As we approach that point where we're using *more* solar electricity than fossil fuel generated electricity, a lot of what had been blue sky power storage ideas suddenly become attractive investments, whether that is superior battery technology or cooling your super-conducting grid with piped coolant liquid that can yield burnable hydrogen at the consumption end. Well before we get to parity, working energy storage systems connected to the grid would start paying investors profits.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Guess math is hard for greens.
Mod parent up! +5 Funny.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Replying to myself. Never trust a green website. Just did my own math.
Wow, blaming the website when it was your own failure of reading comprehension? Way to take personal responsibility there.
The fault here is your own.
So the questions are two:
1. In what alternate reality will the greens allow paving over that much of the Earth?
2. Anyone care to guess how much in dollars, labor and natural resources would be involved in such an epic project?
A) I sincerely hope you're not presuming that it needs to be done in one single blot, as that would be something the greens as well as everybody else would be right to oppose. Setting up a single point of failure is a bad idea.
B) Figure out how much is involved in the continual epic projects of extracting and transporting fossil fuels before you come up with that number and get all breathless with your reaction to that deceptive figure you so badly want to produce.
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".
Back to serious mode; those algae are going to need nitrates and other nutrients, and they're going to need energy. Now the most obvious sources of energy for growing these algae would be something like geothermal or solar. So if we're going to develop this infrastructure just to "grow" diesel, doesn't seem a bit odd to someone that we wouldn't just go straight to the alternative sources? Why create this middle tier of energy production?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why do you need a battery when the grid can store it for you in a plain old hydro dam? You push extra power onto the grid when the sun is out, draw it back when it's not. The only people here in Australia that have batteries attached to their panels live in places where the grid isn't.
I think picking one winning technology at this point is ludicrous, the goal is to (cheaply) reduce CO2 whilst still keeping the lights on. Some places can do that with the sun, others with wind, waves, tides, nukes, geothermal, etc. You start small and then ramp up whatever works best in a particular location, then trade from one location to another across the grid like we already do. A side benefit of this is you can save the hydrocarbons for things only they can do such as plastics, medicine, jet-fuel, etc. Another benefit is that it removes FF's as a source of international tensions. The downside is that existing energy corporations have built their infrastructure around FF's, many are willing to invest in change if given clear regulatory direction, the others are in a word, 'Luddites'.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
Appropriate government subsidies can have a massive impact on domestic installations, particularly for those who would like to install a system but cannot afford it.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
Would it cost money? Sure. Then again, one tank of gas for a pickup truck costs $100 right now.
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.
Yeah. My reaction was, "Oh my gosh! NREL just stated as a fact something that we've all taken for granted as being obviously a fact for at least a couple of decades! Like, wow!"
Either use a worldwide superconducting power grid or use excess power or heat during the day to pump water uphill, spin up flywheels, heat up any number of fluids and store them underground (e.g. molten salt), charge batteries/capacitors, etc. That's a solvable problem. The hard part is to solve it cheaply.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
1. There are huge patches of scrub-land in the southwestern states California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, that would be absolutely perfect for huge solar arrays, and nobody would notice their existence.
2. No guess here, but a lot of problems could be solved as a by-product of the expense. (Think real jobs for people, Infrastructure updates to the power grid in places that it is really needed, demand for oil goes down - fuel prices drop, to name a few....)
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.
Not sure if you're being serious, but I'm fairly certain you can't just start/stop massive electrical plants like that. They're not designed for the stresses of it, and it's likely that you'd not see any significant fuel savings as a result.
And they can really jam
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's re-do the math, shall we? And as much as possible, leave out time units to not complicate things any more than necessary.
The number you need is called solar constant, which according to the Wiki is around 1.361 kW/m^2. That's the combined solar energy passing through a m^2, in places with the sun directly above it, when there would be no atmosphere to get in the way.
Let's say the latitude of an average location in the US reduces that with a factor 1.5, and that only half the sun's energy reaches the surface. Then you're left with around 450 W / m^2. That's 450 MW / km^2, or just over 2 square km to produce the equivalent of a 1 GW power plant.
Also according to the Wiki, the US consumes about 29,000 terawatt hours per year. That's an average of 79.5 TWh / day, 3.31 TWh / hour, or simply said: 3.31 TW (3311 GW, about 10.5 kW per person in the US). Combining with above number, you'd need some 7400 km^2 to cover that (a square of 86 x 86 km, roughly the area of Death Valley). Or some 23 m^2 per person.
Now correct for nighttime/daytime, cloudy skies, solar cell efficiencies etc. I'll leave that up to you. But I'd say it's pretty obvious that there's more than enough sunlight hitting the US to cover all its energy needs. The rest is technology, economics and politics.
I suppose it depends on the kind of plant -- I remember taking a tour of an oil fired plant that had auxiliary generators (very inefficient) which kicked in at peak demand. And in any case I obviously don't literally mean instantaneously halting the rotation of the generator. What I'm talking about is taking the load of the plant. I could have said it that way but I didn't want to get drawn into an irrelevant technical discussion.
. .
I'm always a bit tongue in cheek, but I'm quite serious about the main idea, which amounts to this: you plan for the *marginal* changes you'll need to make along the way, you don't worry about the problems you *would* have if you tried replacing the existing infrastructure overnight. Since you're not going to do it that way, why worry about the problems it presents?
You won't run into an energy storage problem with solar *before* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity. You won't run into energy storage problems *after* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity either. The reason is simple. If in the time it takes us to approach that point a solution isn't found, we'll stop building additional solar capacity.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
one sub division could not generate it's own needs much less a city.
Got Code?
Unbelievably there are parts of the world where using a clothesline is illegal. Bizarre!
Guess math is hard for greens.
We are talking about the same folks standing in line to buy a electric or hybrid car that will never reach a return on investment, math is not their strong point.
Got Code?
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.
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.
> 1. There are huge patches of scrub-land in the southwestern states California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, that would be absolutely perfect for huge solar arrays, and nobody would notice their existence.
Is that before or after the yearly wildfire turns them to dust. Again.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
What you say is completely true. My point is that the article was very high in hand-wavy, "infinite energy if we just pepper the continent with solar panels" goodness, and very low on actual logistics.
Generating the power is one thing. Doing something with it is another. And for some reason the latter seems to get nowhere near the coverage of the former. Presumably because it's not as sexy.
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.
If you mean "why create diesel?" then it's because liquid hydrocarbon fuels have a very high enrgy density, are easily stored, are very easy to make use of, and there is a large amount of existing infrastructure that uses them.
If you mean "why use algae?" then it's just one of the competing paths to produce synthetic fuels. The most economical will win. It potentially has the advantages of low energy input and low maintainence. Disadvantages are the low efficiency and the risk of something eating it.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
.. can't you live without your iron?
Depends. Am I trying to interview for jobs, or have I already found work where I won't be subconsciously judged on my appearance and passed over for promotions as a result of subconscious prejudices?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Yes, that's right. We want to live with modern technology, not have to adapt our power use for some inferior alternative power.
That would be a really big damn battery.
Storage cost... You can store liquid/solid fuel.. you can't store light/heat/solar.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
You can use pumped-storage to store power at peak hours to be used off-peak.If you have enough cheap energy you can generate any fuel you need even if all you have at the starting point is CO2 and water. Solar panels can be made without rare earth minerals. It is all a matter of economics. Once solar panels get cost effective enough it will happen.
Of course you would use solar power, as algae capture energy by photosynthesis. maybe I misunderstood MightyMartian's comment. Photosynthesis isn't particularly efficient, but it has the advantage in having self-reproducing factories. However, this does NOT mean the entirety of the US should be covered with algae ponds. The very idea is ridiculous. Just use what works, and algae (particularly BB) are pretty good at creating hydrocarbons of approximately the right configuration. Now, if you want me to build you a photo-bio-reactor to maximize this, you can hire me. I am getting bored with computer security so it's time I turned my hobby into a profession.
Sadly it won't help the coming water shortages - at all! :-(
P.S. Yeah, I drive a diesel...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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
Bullshit. Just because the technology doesn't spring to life fully baked and meeting all needs it shouldn't be used? I want solar, I'll happily pay for my electricity use during the night in exchange for getting some of that back with my feed-in during the day when peak usage occurs currently. My return for feed-in need not be 1:1 either. No this won't mean that we can shut down all of our power plants but it will mean that we could significantly lower their usage during the day if a majority of people got on-board. I don't need to go off-grid with banks of batteries to maintain, I am perfectly happy remaining grid-tied and for the majority of homes this works just fine. The hurdle to solar remains cost because while panel costs may have fallen the labor costs to get them installed sure hasn't and there's little competition for the work to push it down and too few skilled folks doing it.
A friend of mine just had panels installed on his home, feasible due to a subsidy he gets in Texas and that Virginia where I live doesn't offer. His cost was under $15K and during the day his meter spins backwards. He's no ecofreak and he's not rich but he's capable of taking the long view and he figured that lowering his overall monthly costs in the long run was worthwhile - I wish I could so easily do the same myself!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
Sure you can. That's the entire concept of a peaking plant and any oil plant would be rigged for peaking. It's too expensive to run it as base load.
Peaking plants can and do spin up and down quite quickly. The GE LM6000 (basically a modified 747 engine) units they use in one of our newest natgas plants can go from standing still to maximum output in under 5 minutes and back down at about the same rate.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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.
But it's also true that the power load is highest during the day, right when solar panels are producing their power. Solar panels work well for that daytime bump above the baseload power. Think about solar panels in Texas, right when your AC is running at maximum the solar panels are producing at maximum.
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
You are much too optimistic. The amount of solar power hitting the ground does not come anywhere near to 1361 W/m^2 average, 24x7. That figure actually represents the amount of solar power occluded by one m^2 of the earth's cross section in outer space. Considerably less than that reaches the ground, even ideally. And it is zero at night. It is much reduced when you average the daytime period even in good weather. It is further reduced by bad weather. It is still further reduced as you get further from the equator. The true average figure os solar energy reaching the ground is closer to 164 W/m^2.
With a typical conversion efficiency of 15%, that makes 25 W/m^2 of averaged electricity production.
Sigh. That's actually the figure for the amount of solar power passing through 1 m^2 of sectional area in space at the orbit of earth. The amount reaching the ground is considerably less. In fact, averaged across the complete land and water surface of the earth over a full 24 hours, accounting for weather, the actual figure is more like 164 W/m^2. With a conversion efficiency of 15%, that works out to an average electricity production of 25 W/m^2.
That's still an awful lot of power. Just don't be disappointed if the actual figure is closer to 245,667 GW than your figure of 13,374.104 GW.
Not to be pedantic, but 86 km^2 is actually 86 square kilometers. A square of size 86 x 86 km = 7396 km^2. Two different things altogether.
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
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
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
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.
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
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! --
Most cells range from 8 percent (various thin biofilms) to 40 percent. But the cost factors differ greatly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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"
That may be, but that still means Solar power can ONLY function as an adjunct to other existing power. Once the sun goes down, you *still* need power to cook your dinner, turn on the heat if necessary, etc.
The article was (to me) implying that solar could replace existing power wholesale. Which it can't.
So even WITH the subsidy, he still had to pay $15K for his setup?
I think you just negated your own argument. You say "if only the majority of people got on board", and yet you yourself admit that you haven't and won't be because you simply can't afford it.
As I said... solar will never take off until it's much cheaper and more robust.
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.
The USDOE already proved at Sandia NREL both that special strains of algae are unnecessary and that you don't need a special bioreactor to make algae for biofuel economically viable. What is needed is cooperation from the government. Since I have essentially written this comment dozens of times, I finally broke down and made a referenceable explanation of why burning oil is stupid and unnecessary.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, I said UNDER $15K as I didn't have the number handy. I asked him again - his out of pocket was $8500. I think that's pretty damned reasonable. Frankly, if I could get it done in my area for $15K and zero out my electric bill I'll probably do it. When it costs $30K or more is when I walk away. My friend hasn't gotten his first bill yet so the savings aren't yet known but he HAS witnessed his meter spinning backwards so I suspect he won't be paying anything this month to the utility to run his AC.
Install cost right now is the issue - panel costs are damned low. The industry is currently small and specialized, when there are more skilled workers doing installs and if subsidies are offered this will take off like a rocket for those of us who have decent sites. IMO it simply makes sense and no I don't think $15K is a ton of money for something that should last 30 years or more. No batteries needed for this to work like you asserted. Yes, it needs to be cheaper or subsidized, most likely the latter. Any solar installs that take drain off the grid are an investment in infrastructure IMO and make sense.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It can. By the time we need it to we should have the storage problem solved.
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.
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!