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Deploying Solar In California's Urban Areas Could Meet Demand Five Times Over
Lucas123 writes: About 8% of terrestrial surfaces in California have been developed, ranging from cities and buildings to park spaces. If photovoltaic panels, along with concentrating solar power, were more effectively deployed in and around those areas, it could meet between three and five times what California currently uses for electricity, according to a new study. The study from the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that using small- and utility-scale solar power in and around developed areas could generate up to 15,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year using photovoltaic technology, and 6,000 TWh of energy a year using concentrating solar power technology. "Integrating solar facilities into the urban and suburban environment causes the least amount of land-cover change and the lowest environmental impact," post-doctoral environmental earth scientist Rebecca Hernandez said.
Feed into a small molten salt reservoir buried in the yard to pull out of at night? Or some sort of battery to draw out of instead? Assuming high-draw appliances like the stove, water heater, and furnace were from an alternate source like natural gas, the rest shouldn't draw all that much power at night. And even the water could be switched over to an on-demand system, rather than what most US homes use right now.
What brand of socialism though? The wunderkind society that resulted from the USSR? Maybe North korean style Kim Il Sung worship is more your style? Maybe the economic wasteland that is cuba? I know, the 'people's republic' of china must be your thing as they've got excellent track records in things like civil rights, quality of life, and relative equity. Oh wait, that's right, none of these societies ever got close to that of the united states, never mind some promise of utopia. In fact, their political policies reenforced inequity, to the point of having two currencies in the case of the USSR. Guess which currency the average worker got paid for his labor? (hint: it wasn't the one that was worth anything on the market)
You'd think the political squabbles of the 20th century would make people realize how dangerous ideologies like this are to sustainable societies, never mind free ones. None of them were meant to help the common man, they were meant to keep the elite in power.
I thought solar was supposed to allow us to use less fossil fuels like natural gas and not more. Any gains by using solar may be wiped out by burning more natural gas to make up for storage problems. I don't think that is a good plan.
These problems are not going to get solved by whining about them. Instead, we should just build the solar panels. At first, storage won't be a problem, because we can use the peak energy for A/C. And when solar power actually grows to a point where storage is a problem, it will be fixed, because there will be money to be made in energy storage.
Solar is already causing a problem. It is called the duck graph. Basically as solar rapidly drops off at sunset conventional is having trouble ramping up to meet demand. There is too many incentives for solar production and not enough for storage and that needs to be changed now.
Lets install a $20,000 battery in a house and replace it every ten years.
How about you buy a ~$3k '70%' used EV battery, then use it for ~10 years until it gets to 30% or so, at which point you finally send it to the recyclers before buying a new one?
Of course, that would entail both a massively increased number of strong EVs to supply the 'retired' batteries, and probably so much solar that you're encouraged to charge at work when the sun's out.
I don't read AC A human right
If only we had a way to predict when the sun would set...
It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust. Perhaps that is an exaggeration but not by much, mining enough lithium, cadmium, or whatever, is not trivial. We just do not have the capacity to produce that amount of electricity storage in batteries.
I held out promise for technologies like flywheel storage as it was a simple technology, requiring not much more than a motor/generator and a weight. I then realized that such devices would be expensive, require considerable maintenance, and still require significant amounts of rare earth elements to produce.
Other storage technologies have similar problems. Water storage requires differing elevations and, obviously, large amounts of water. Compressed air storage requires suitable caverns. Molten salt storage requires vast resources as well.
None of these can compete with even first generation nuclear power, and we have fourth generation nuclear power coming on line soon.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nuclear power is the answer. I know someone is going to point out the nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power now.
Yes, waste is a concern. But the real concern is the economics of nuclear energy has never made any sense. It is outrageously expensive, and never has a nuclear power plant been able to have been built without massive capital from governments. An individual can install wind and solar and other alternative energies on a local scale. There are solvable problems involved. Eventually, the problem of energy storage will be solved. But the problem with nuclear power, which is that is the most expensive form of energy ever conceived, will never be solved. Nuclear energy proponents ignore this, but it is the only thing standing in the way of your dream of nuclear power being the solution to the world's energy needs: its just too damn expensive. Money wins every time.
The Admin and the Engineer
Grid scale sodium sulphur batteries are already deployed at multiple sites around the world, especially in Japan and Hawaii. The only rare elements are in the control electronics, they last much longer than lithium and are easy to recycle.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The more solar power on the grid means more gas turbines.
Only in the US where gas is cheap due to fracking. In Germany they have closed older coal plants and replaced them with newer, cleaner ones that can ramp their output up quickly to support solar. Those coal plants use carbon capture so are actually quite low on CO2 emissions.
The problem then comes in that any technology that makes storing electric energy cheap also makes coal and nuclear power cheaper. Then why not just make solar power cheaper? Because that will never solve the problem of the sun going down.
Um... So if storing electricity were cheap, that wouldn't solve the problem of solar only being available during daylight?
Also, coal and nuclear are not cheap at all. Coal looks cheap until you include all the externalized costs. Nuclear is just damn expensive from any angle.
My answer to that is Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors.
Unfortunately no-one with the tens of billions of dollars needed to build a commercial molten salt reactor is willing to give you any. Something about the way all molten salt reactors built so far had severe problems and don't look like commercially viable technology must be putting them off.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Those problems are trivially (albeit perhaps not inexpensively) solved by simply specifying a big enough battery.
I'm 99% certain you have poor insulation (compared to what anyone who was trying to run their AC off solar power would have), and that's your real problem.
Besides, almost everywhere except the tropics gets cool enough at night that opening windows and running a whole house fan should be able to let people avoid running the AC at night. (And houses in warm areas like that should be designed so that windows can be opened at night, by (for example) having wide enough roof overhangs to keep rain out. If you live in Florida and your house is designed the same way as one in New England, you're Doing It Wrong.)
Yes!
You might also want to keep in mind that if there's no solar power, there's not much solar heat gain either, so your AC will require less power at that time (if it needs to run at all).
By the time you've increased the efficiency of your house to the point that solar makes sense to begin with, the answer is "not all that big."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust.
That is complete nonsense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Raw earth elements belong to the most abundant elements on earth. Only the name is strange due to historical reasons when they got "discovered".
like flywheel storage ..., and still require significant amounts of rare earth elements to produce
No they don't. You only need a flywheel and a generator. If you sacrifice 1% efficiency there are no raw earth elements involved at all. (*facepalm*)
Molten salt storage requires vast resources as well. :D
What a nonsense
None of these can compete with even first generation nuclear power ... oki. Nevertheless the gasoline/diesel is the storage medium. And the bike the user/producer of energy.
Ofc it can't. You compare storage technology with power production. That is like comparing biodiesel with a motorbike. Wow, the motorbike is not even using diesle. So now you compare the motorbike with gasoline
Your comparison makes no sense, especially as nuclear power is the most expensive power to produce, since ever actually. It never was cheaper than coal, water or anything else.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.