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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Seriously, building such things is not a "cost" but an investment. Just allocate the whole cost of the past several Middle-Eastern wars to your power bill and see how it goes for ya.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I did a quick calculation. Using 100W = 3 square feet.
That is roughly 3.2 square miles/gigawatt of solar cells.
200,000Gigawats would be 640,000 square miles, or roughly 16.8% of the US land mass.
I'm just saying - the numbers they are throwing around are a bit amazing. Further - what happens at night? Do they have a decent storage system for this juice?
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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
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.
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 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.
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?
According to the laws of thermodynamics the answer to your question "how long can it run without solar input" varies based on the size of the pool of salt. We have cubic miles of salt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
The calculations at http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/ with optimal array placement came up with slightly different numbers, fwiw.
Though granted, the overnight storage would definitely be a challenge if solar scaled that high, and a lot more long-distance transmission lines would be needed.
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
Pretty well, actually. The most progressive designs actually have enough salt on hand to store 3 days' worth of energy. I'm assuming you'd need 5 or 6 days of excellent sunlight to save that up, but assuming you're consistently collecting more than you consume you'd be able to weather a couple days of rainstorms without issue.
And they would, in fact, still produce some energy on cloudy days. Most designs call for parabolic mirror installations, which will focus the light onto the tower even if the source is diffuse (i.e. on the other side of clouds). It wouldn't look as impressive, but you'd still be focusing all the available light onto the salt reservoirs and slowly heating it to the melting point.
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.
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Yeah, we should rather spend all that money on importing oil! At least that does something for those poor Arabs and we get rid of that pesky money for good. And we even get some CO2 out of it!
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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".
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.
Would it cost money? Sure. Then again, one tank of gas for a pickup truck costs $100 right now.
And, in the 1950's, computers filled a room and cost millions. Now, my iPhone (actual cost around $500) can probably equal all the processing power and on-line memory in the world at that time. Costs will come down, steadily, as the technology matures. With PV, prices will continue to go down as the market continues to grow. That's the way technology works.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.
Well, yes-- everything does. Off-the-shelf consumer photovoltaics typically come with 25-year warranties guaranteeing 80% of original capacity at year 25. They'll gradually degrade at about 0.5%-1% of original capacity per year-- they'll last more than four decades.
What's the energy input to replace a panel?
Depends on the type of panel and how much sun it gets when you hang it up, but construction energy payback is generally 1-2 years. Given the above lifetimes, you'll typically produce somewhere between 10x and 50x the input energy needed to make the panel.
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.
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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.
We do a lot better with non photovoltaic generation with molten salt.
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