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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.
All that electrical power will only be used to oppress the workers more. Capitalism is at a dead end. Socialist revolution is humanity's last and only hope.
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so this doesn't solve the fundamental problem of just using too much energy.
The main concern for solar hasn't been one of the space necessary for a long time. Partially covering something like half the south-facing side of a roof has been sufficient to cover a home's needs for quite some time. A few more percent in panel efficiency would only decrease the coverage necessary.
Like for most things, the real killer has been cost. Smaller footprints are good, reduces cost and increases flexibility(you don't NEED to take down that one tree...). Today it's getting to the point that we need to work to make installs cheaper, including the inverter, which of the items that can fail, currently have the lowest warranty period as well. If you 'plan' on replacing it once it's out of warranty, you'll go through 3 inverters per replacement of the solar panels. Yes, both actually last longer than that, but it's an expense to be wary of.
Personally, in order to manage cost I like to propose 'dual use' applications - solar panels on a roof can act as a solar barrier and reduce the heat load in the house, reducing electricity needs for HVAC even as it supplies electricity for the very same HVAC. My latest 'idea', which is far from unique, is the 'solar car park'. We know people like parking in the shade, and solar panels are typically* strong enough that you can use them directly for roofing material as long as your roof is either small enough or you don't need it to be absolutely tight(like for a house). A few dribbles won't hurt a car but the shade certainly would be nice.
So you mount the panels up over your parking lot(or driveway), and you come out to a shaded, and therefore not blazing hot, car. You park at the store and again, don't come back to a blazing hot car. As a bonus, it'll even extend the life of your paint job and interior, as well as help protect any sensitive electronics that don't like baking in a hot vehicle.
*Some are, some aren't, but it's easy enough to specify/check.
I don't read AC A human right
There's a good reason why we call it the most progressive state in the U.S. (if not the world).
After all the recent baseless insults, all that is left to say is Everybody line up and suck it.
What is the material, labor and recycling cost of doing so ? Lack of space is likely not the blocking issue with solar. Google probably has the answers.
And meet 0% of the demand at night if they don't have storage which is very expensive.
What would prevent the hippies from trying to kill each other, only to accidentally end up shooting cops in the face with a .40 caliber bullet?
And on a more serious note, why hasn't California tried getting water from the ocean? I heard they were going to run out of the stuff in less than a year.
What are you waiting for. This is your opportunity to completely transform your state and become energy independent leading the way for a greener and cleaner America and even a chance to make a buck og two in the process by selling off your excess power production... Talk to people in your neighbourhood pool your resources that way you don't need to wait for incompetent politicians working for the lobbyists or greedy power companies out to take your rightful chance to make an earning from you. Best of luck you don't just have a window of opportunity... you have the barn door open right now!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
A standard solar panel (like http://www.wholesalesolar.com/...) is about $150/m^2.
The size of California: 423 000 km^2. One-fifth of 8% of that, to meet the current need, is about 6768 km^2.
At $150/m^2, that would be approximately $1E12. That's [only] $26 000 per citizen. Start the haggle!
with which you do fuck all except hate on the rich people who don't screw over the planet.
Really. Kocks fine, Gore not? It can't be because Gore isn't rich enough: he's bloody loaded. It's that Gore isn't a planet raper and funding the anti-environmental mental movement of the denier industry like the Kochs.
I was driving through Orlando recently and I was amazed by the amount of disused land - stores which had gone out of business and so on. In front of these stores were very large parking lots which were doing nothing but growing weeds. It struck me that if solar panels were mounted onto trailers that you could simply drive them to such a vacant spot, park them and feed the power straight into the grid.
If the laws were friendly to such use - requiring vacant lots to be used for this purpose etc. then it's not hard to see businesses springing up to make use of it. The biggest issue is what to do with the surplus but there are answers to that too
When housing associations, communities and local government care more that your lawn is green than preserving water because there is a drought, what chance do people have in making serious use of solar energy by putting panels on the roof of their house?
Reference: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Fernand-Bogman-Upland-Drought-Lawn-Crime-283507091.html
I'm sure that utilities will lobby local governments to try and limit what sort of impact solar panels can have if it becomes clear they will be a threat.
I'd bet the more delusional Space Nutters will still try to convince us (and themselves, mostly) that space-based solar ever made any sense...
Your post almost sounds like an advertisement...
Anyways, I dislike the idea of having the solar roofs be on wheels for a couple reasons:
Wind Resistance. If you don't have it anchored down, wind(or thieves) can spirit it away much easier.
Power connection - should be permanent.
Basically, unless the wheels are a lot more robust than what I'm picturing, you'd have to 'roll it inside' for severe weather, which I'd really prefer to avoid.
I don't read AC A human right
This study claims a reduction in carbon emissions from solar power but I've read studies that show increased carbon emissions from solar power. Why is that? Because solar power is very poor at matching when people use power. Sure, people tend to turn stuff off at night when the sun is down and turn them on when the sun shines but the load curve seen by utilities shows a peek power usage at about 6:00PM, when the sun is setting and solar power has already begun to wane.
How does this translate into increased carbon output? When solar power wanes there needs to be a power source that can be brought up to power quickly and still be inexpensive enough that it is economical. That is where natural gas comes in. Instead of using highly efficient combined cycle power, which takes hours to come up to power, the utilities use natural gas turbines. Combined cycle power plants get about 60% efficiency, gas turbine power plants might get 40%. Turning the turbines off and on burns more fuel, reducing the effective efficiency.
So rather than using a highly efficient combined cycle power plant a utility that must accommodate the quickly changing output of solar power must use less efficient gas turbines. The more solar power on the grid means more gas turbines. More gas turbines means less efficient use of natural gas. Therefore there is no net reduction of carbon emissions from use of solar power.
Then comes the argument for storing the solar energy for use when the sun does not shine. That adds cost. We have nothing that can store electricity that is cheaper than burning natural gas or coal, using nuclear power, or using hydro power. If solar power is to become cheap enough to compete with coal and nuclear then we need a means to store electricity that is cheap.
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.
Solar power is a dead end. Solar power would have to be cheap enough to make up for the costs of its manufacture and storage as well as compete with coal and nuclear. While we might run out of coal in 300 years we just cannot run out of nuclear fuel, it is just too common.
Then there is the environment disaster that is caused by the manufacture of photovoltaic panels. Making them requires significant amounts of water, toxic chemicals, and lots of energy.
Solar power is not the answer. Nuclear power is the answer. I know someone is going to point out the nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power now. My answer to that is Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors. These things eat radioactive waste. If it is radioactive then it is fuel. If it's not radioactive then it's not waste any more, right?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Why do you think they'd need to cover 1/5th of California? Urban area cover (rooftops). 1/5th of THAT would meet demands.
How much of California is rooftop. Not how much ground area is California.
They get power from other states using solar power when they haven't got any sunlight, and get to sell their power to other states when they have sunlight and the other state doesn't.
So of course it helps California.
I quoteth the GP:
423 000 km^2. One-fifth of 8% of that, to meet the current need, is about 6768 km^2
The tip off that you misread was that 6,768 is nowhere near 1/5 of 423,000. This is the *low end* of their estimate.
This was exactly the problem I had with the "solar road" crowdfunding boondoggle. Their end game of covering all the asphalted surfaces with their road panels came out to nearly a quadrillion dollars. And that was assuming they lowered the cost of their system - concrete sub-base, road prep, installation, component manufacture, and infrastructure - to about $125 per module (i.e. about $1/lb, installed).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Sounds great, few problems though. First off is cost, they're talking about placing solar panels across millions of square acres. I could have mistyped but from what I can figure (6.7M acres / 15 sqft solar panels) that would take a mind boggling number of solar panels, almost 20 Billion. At current rates that would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 Trillion dollars. Secondly what do you do with all that power, you'll either have to build one heck of a grid storage system or fundamentally rethink how electricity is used, or a little of both. Our energy future will involve a mix of power if we have any sense, Some solar to take up the slack on those hot days, some fossil for peak loads or cloudy days and nuclear/coal/wind for baseload.
Until there is a solution for nuclear waste, it is illegal to build nuclear power plants in California. Notice that when the sun shine, there is no need to use natural gas, so gas use is reduced. Your argument is mistaken.
And you need to read the text again:
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 would take about 50,000km^2 to power the entire world. All power use. At less than half the efficiency you get today. With a projected increase up to 2050.
Your figures should have been reworked to view how wrong they are.
Look around you. Virtually the entire productive sector of society is run on libertarian principles: Contracts and "for-profit" arbitration; voluntary trade.
Libertarian principles are what has raised humanity out of the muck and into a quality of life that nobody could have ever envisioned. The State is simply a parasite on the libertarian society that modern civilization has constructed and on which modern civilization runs and because of which modern civilization has been so incredibly successful.
Libertarianism is an utter success, and socialism has always been a complete failure.
One of the reasons Denmark can run on wind (currently 39% of their total) and solar power (500 MW total from 90,000 private installations according to wikipedia) is that we have installed multiple DC transmissions lines between Denmark and Norway, and hydro-electric power is by far the most responsive to changing load.
On the west coast mountains we have storage dams where surplus power can be used to pump up water during periods of surplus production and then let down again when Denmark, Sweden or countries further south need some extra power.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... you can see that this is _by far_ the largest grid energy storage form, accounting for more than 99% of the total capacity worldwide.
The total efficiency (70%-87%) is quite good, which means that this is not just a good idea but can pay for itself anywhere the difference between peak and off-peak energy costs are larger than the ~20% that is lost to pump friction.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Okay, current solar concentration clocks in at about 100MW steady output and about 300GWh per annum per square mile of facility.
You're talking about covering up about 20,000 square miles, or roughly 12% of the state, in solar concentrator facilities.
Never mind that Nuclear is many times more energy-dense and could support the state, with a more realistic investment in renewables in just a fraction of that land area.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"could" it could meet between three and five times what California currently uses for electricity.
What we need is a better way to transmit, store or retrieve power (electrical, heat, momentum, pressure, chemical, it doesn't matter - and yes, a room temperature superconductor will count). Do that and pretty instantly several things will happen:
1)Coal plants will all shut down. They are too expensive now, even not accounting for their massively bad ecological issues.
2)New natural gas plants will cease to be created. A few might even shut down.
3) New nuclear plants will suddenly be approved .... in the middle of deserts and other areas safely far away from population centers
4) New geothermal, solar, tidal, and wind power plants will pop up to replace the coal plants.
Also, there is the possibility that cars will switch to the new power source, but no guarantee.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Can they turn electricity into water? better get working on that system fast.
State sells the excess to neighbors for profit, helping the State's budget?
The US has been a mixed system for many decades. The degree of success of the US corresponds to the degree that we are a socialist system. Capitalism is more like a disease that has reached its end stage and is killing off its host. It is obvious that California can do quite well with solar and wind replacing nuclear and fossil fueled power systems. I'm in Florida and we need a way to turn the sun off a bit here. We have so much intense sun light that half my town vanishes nine months a year as it is an oven here. And the disease called capitalism is all that has kept my state from going to sun and tide to supply all of our power needs. Special interest groups are blocking progress at all turns. Our wretched governor will fire state employees for using the words global warming. And this is despite the fact that a large portion of our state will soon be submerged by rising seas. The Florida Keys as well as the Everglades will be salt water lagoons soon enough. Parts of Miami beach are already in trouble. The first national shock will occur when the vastly expensive beach front properties in south Florida become ineligible for insurance due to rising seas. The financial chaos alone could be severe enough to bankrupt the nation. It will also mean that we will have no fresh water supplies for about six million Floridians unless we build a huge network of desalinization plants to obtain fresh water. It will also mean that one of the few places in America that can grow crops in the winter will no longer be used for farming.
The solar power people should be celebrating right now. Oil is now the cheapest it has been in six years. Why should they be celebrating? Because oil price is a proxy for energy prices. If oil is cheap then all energy is cheap.
If oil is cheap then energy sources like oil shale and tar sands look like a bad idea. If oil is expensive then that makes oil shale and tar sands look profitable.
I hear so many times how we need to make oil expensive to save the whales, or whatever needs saving this week, and that just sounds counter to the basics of economics to me. We need to make oil cheap. Make it so cheap that no one wants it.
I can buy one ton of dirt for $5, I've done it. Why can I buy dirt that cheap? Because no one wants it. If people wanted it then it would not be that cheap. It costs more in the fuel to get it than the dirt itself costs. Make oil the same and no one will go get it. Make energy so cheap that no one will bother to expend the energy to get the oil.
How do we make energy so cheap that no one bothers to drill for oil? Well, I have an idea. My idea does not involve carbon credits, energy taxes, or any of that because all of those raise the price of energy. Raise the price of energy and things like coal and oil shale is profitable. DO NOT TAX CARBON!
Another thing, who makes the most profit from oil? It's not the oil companies. It's not the refineries. It certainly is not the local filling station. It's the government. Taxes on fossil fuels makes the government piles of money. They aren't going to kill their golden goose. Demanding a raise in carbon taxes only makes the government more dependent on fossil fuels.
Solar panels cost the government money, they subsidize their production. Where does this money come from? Oil taxes. What happens if solar power replaces oil and the tax structure stays in place? The government runs out of money. When the government gets serious about solar power then we will see it taxed. Not only do solar power subsidies take money from the poor and give it to the rich people that can afford solar power it is holding solar power back.
Solar power subsidies is holding it back. The solar power industry exists to maximize government subsidy, not energy output. Remove the subsidy and the industry must either make something that can compete with oil or fade out of existence. Our economy cannot support losers forever.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Basically as solar rapidly drops off at sunset conventional is having trouble ramping up to meet demand.
On the other hand, wind power in many of the best sites peaks strongly in exactly the "duck head" period.
The reason is the "lake effect": Land heats and cools far more rapidly than bodies of water (which are nearly a constant temperature on a daily cycle). The difference forms a heat engine, and the cycle lags the solar cycle by several hours. In the afternoon and evening (peaking about sunset) the wind blows strongly from the water to the land. (In the morning it blows from the land to the water though more weakly.)
The wind power available through a given swept cross-section goes up with the CUBE of the wind speed: (The energy per unit mass goes up with the square of the velocity, and the amount of mass flowing goes with the first power, multiplying one more factor of v.) That means a doubling of the wind speed multiplies the availabe power bya factor of 8, a tripling by 27, and so on. So it doesn't take much variation in wind speed to create a large variation in power.
Some of the best sites to take advantage of this are on the western temperate-zone coasts of continents (which happen to contain a lot of the urban load.) There the lake effect is extreme, combining with the prevailig winds.
One of the most extreme examples is California's Altamont Pass, where a break in the mountains funnels the prevailing, westerlies combined with the lake effect winds - with the Pacific Ocean as the "lake" and CA's Central Valley as the "land". The area is practically paved with windmills.
But you don't need something that extreme. My NV place, in the eastern Sierra foothills, gets strong afternoon winds from the Nevada Desert working against the damp forests of the Sierras.
Even without a strong lake effect to "chop off the duck's head", wind and solar power complement each other and reasonably match demand in several other ways in areas where both are available. For a lot of sites with intermittent sun-blocking weather, the climate is such that the cloudy times are windy and the calm times sunny. (Wind may be more prevalent in winter, as well.) Sun power closely tracks the solar input component of air-conditioning load, while wind goes up (though more steeply) with heat gain/loss across insulation and via air infiltration. So with a combo of wind and solar energy harvesting, when the weather hands you more load it also hands you more power to handle it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
Vanadium Redox, too. (Mainly "down under" - because the patents are still in force and the little company with them has all the business it can handle and doesn't seem interested in licensing it to potential competition.) Marvelous technology.
New Lithium (and related) batteries with much more stable (and thus long-lasting) electrode designs and hysterically low losses and fast charging/discharging are also starting to hit the market. It will be interesting to see what happens in three or four years when Tesla's new Nevada battery "Gigafactory" comes online and starts ramping up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust.
Wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. The oceans alone contain more than enough of every element we care about. If the demand is there, the supply is easy. The only limit is ramp-up time for extracting.
Lithium: The total lithium content of seawater is very large and is estimated as 230 billion tonnes
Neodymium: 0.1ppt in the oceans still means >1.2 million tonnes.
Freakin' Uranium: over 1 BILLION TONNES just hanging out in the water.
I hope you've learned something today, and that you stop spouting nonsense.
That's why I specified the water heater, of course. They don't give a hoot about losing power one way or another,
And there's a reason why I mentioned saving power for the fridge/stove. If you're going 'extreme', yes, you could get a fridge that allows for power interruption, but most of that would be going with a 'sunfrost' type model which can go for like a day, if unopened, without turning on it's compressor anyways.
It sounds like your house's 'only' high power system that I would hook into a relay system would be the AC system. IE if you turn on every light in the house, every electric appliance, while in a reduced power availability situation, it'd kill the HVAC until you shut some things off.
I don't read AC A human right