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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.
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
Storage is today's big issue in the energy world.
Having said that, the cost of a storage system used to double the cost of a 3-4 kW (peak) PV system about 5 years ago. I expect since then the prices of PV has fallen more sharply than the price of lead acid batteries, meaning it may well now triple, but still it's hardly "very expensive".
It is cheaper, and more optimal electrically, to sell the power to the grid and then buy it back from another generator when you aren't generating. Of course that doesn't work if everyone is using the same kind of generators and there's no storage, which is why we need storage. As many storage technologies suffer from efficiencies of scale it probably makes more sense to at least partially centralise the storage.
What probably needs to happen (it certainly needs to happen in .uk) is the energy market needs to be restructured so as to make storing energy profitable, then companies will set up to do it.
foo
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.
Calling any party/politcian from the US as socialist when they don't even have true single payer universal healthcare is just laughable. Our right wing parties in Europe are more socialist than Obama or the Democratic party of the USA.
I agree completely but few people are working on storage as it is not sexy. They are content with pointing the finger at conventional plants and saying they will handle it. Sorry but the cost of power from conventional plants will rise if they only produce at night.
Right now, we need less energy at night, so it's not a problem if there's less generated. And as long as solar doesn't cover 100% of daytime use, the same plants also need to run during the day. It's not a huge deal. We can also do a lot more with dynamic real-time pricing, so there will be financial incentive to move consumption around to peak production time. People can put their electric cars on the grid, and buy energy when it's cheap, and sell it back when it's expensive, and make a little bit of profit on the side.
You sell any daytime excess back to the grid during the day, and draw back at night
You make it seem that the same energy that you sell during the day is bought back at night. That is not true. The electricity you sold during the day is used during the day and reduces the production requirements for conventional electricity produces. The electricity you buy at night is produced by those conventional producers. Someone still has to produce the tlectricity you use at night and it will not be another PV user because it will probably be night there too.
see also Tesla's new home battery pack stuff?
Lets install a $20,000 battery in a house and replace it every ten years.
It's odd how it seems like most posters are trying to find problems rather than trying to find solutions.
It's odd how it seems that some people solve 50% of the problem and leave the other 50% to other people to solve. There are solution and the main one being storage. There is too much emphasis on electricity production technology and not enough on storage.
It's almost like you don't want solar power, when 'solar' is one of the things California has so much of.
The problem is that California has almost no "solar" at night and little is being done to compensate for that. It does not matter if 4x the required energy is produced by solar if only a very little of it is available at night.
The article makes it look like solar is the solution to the energy problem. It is part of the solution but more work on storage needs to be done.
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
I'm sure you can get a discount on a $1e12 order.
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.
What state has sunlight at sunset in California? When California is having it's sunset issue the rest if the continental US is already dark.
And as long as solar doesn't cover 100% of daytime use
The article is touting how solar can produce 500% of daytime use. See the problem? Those conventional plant would have to ramp down and back up again. Ramping costs more than continuous operation.
People can put their electric cars on the grid, and buy energy when it's cheap
That sounds great until you go to drive your car and it is drained.
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
Every single claim in that post is just plain false.
What has been responsibile for humanity's recent improvements in quality of life has been science: a blatantly socialist system.
There is nothing libertarian about contracts, profit-seeking or voluntary trade, these are found in ALL variations of capitalism AND in many variations of socialism as well.
Nowhere in my speech did I once speak in favour of the state, but the reality is that there is a LOT of very wealthy countries with big governments and not a single rich country WITHOUT one. Small governments are only found where poverty is at it's worst. The sole EXCEPTION was Andalusia - no government and high quality of life, but THAT was socialist.
Libertarianism has NEVER been tried - you're just trying to shoehorn a bunch of stuff and claim it's libertarianism while ignoring the most IMPORTANT parts of what DEFINES libertarianism. You don't know what libertarianism actually IS - you just like the sound of the word it seems and apply it to everything you approve of regardless of whether that is a particularly or exclusively libertarian thing, and ignoring that the things that ARE particularly and exclusively libertarian have NOT in fact ever been tried.
Only one variation of socialism has been a failure, there are thousands of others - and at least one has been a remarkable success, I gave you the example right there in my post. The kind of capitalism practiced in the Rhineland countries, and Scandinavian welfare-state concepts are considered socialist by American standards and THEY are MORE successful than America has ever been.
Maybe not in the way America likes to measure (total wealth in the country) but in the way that MATTERS: actual quality of life of most citizens.
They have very few poor people, and the few they have live much better lives than the poor in the USA - now THAT is success.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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"
Storage is today's big issue in the energy world.
No, it is not. It is only relevant for "off grid" situations like on a boat/ship, or if you really want to have your house/flat "off grid".
For the grid and large scale energy production, storage becomes relevant when you actually have situations where it is economically interesting to use stored energy ... that is not going to happen unless you produce minimum 50% of your power with renewables. And then you can at max store like 5% - 10% so economically it is very likely not feasible. You rather accept that you waste that few percentages.
On the other hand, you can try to organize a market and transport capabilities, so you can simply sell the excess power.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Libertarian principles are what has raised humanity out of the muck and into a quality of life that nobody could have ever envisioned.
Yeah, like this or this.
Lead acid batteries have long been known to be a poor solution to store large amounts of electricity.
And since long, decades I think, they are replaced by lead + gel batteries.
The cost of storage will always be high as the costs include the following
Pretty irrelevant when you need storage to run the grid. E.g. pumped storage is like 10% of total production in energy storage and power production. (GWh and GW). 5% you need minimum for a modern grid, otherwise you have to run with overproduction and use resistors to burn off excess energy (excess energy your ordinary heat based plants produce because they can not follow load down fast enough).
Both of these technologies need very specific conditions
Nope, for a pumped storage plant you only need a pool of water and a pipe and a pump/turbine that is lower than the water level. Ofc, it is sexier if the pool is on a 300m high hill top and your pump/turbine at the base. But having just 10m would be enough to have a running pumped storage plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Those conventional plant would have to ramp down and back up again. Ramping costs more than continuous operation.
Ever looked at the load curve of your country?
Conventional plants have to ramp up anyway around dawn and ramp down anyway shortly after dusk.
Neither for the plants nor the operators it is a difference, only the moment in time changes if you add solar power to the mix.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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
Translation:
"I, nospam007, don't know what socialism is. I've heard some people on the TV say that Obama is socialist, so I'm going to assume he is. I'm not good at learning, or I simply refuse to."