Posted earlier in this thread.
Have at it.
Sam does have a valid point.
Maybe centralized infrastructure is the problem. Would it be possible to localize residential energy production? Solar panel roofs and some big ass batteries; would that power a house or fall woefully short?
Is there any way to use solar panels on a roof in a snowy climate? I was thinking something heated to keep it from accumulating, but it seems like that would burn up most of the power being generated.
The ideal in my mind would be a solar panel roof making a house self-sufficient and also generate enough extra to keep two electric vehicles charged. How far into pipedream territory is that?
You can get to their “rewiring America field manual” from there, but they’re gonna want your email address.
Short summary: they recommend devolving a lot of electrical generation to rooftop/neighborhood area solar generation. The basic load-out for any house becomes solar, heat pump, electrical charging station for cars, and a smart panel that can cut power to appliances to keep overall load down. They even have some plans to put batteries into appliances so they can keep going during such downtimes - much like a laptop computer can keep going when main power is out.
However, they also have plans to quickly increase the capacity of the electrical grid to be able to compensate for local discrepancies between production and consumption. As they point out, the capacity of the national grid more than quadrupled in 20 years between 1950 and 1970, there’s not much reason it can’t be done again - if the political will is there. (it isn’t)
I live in a very sunny area about 32 N latitude. If we doubled the number of solar panels currently on our roof, we would be able to power a heat pump year-round. Add a few more panels, and we’d be able to power electric vehicles as well. At the moment, we’re grid-tied, which does the balancing for us - we accumulate credits in spring and fall and deplete them in summer (and would do so in winter if we went heat pump). But in raw terms, the generating capacity is there, and is remarkably cheap.
Won’t help the folks in Alberta, but they can mine our copper for some HVDC lines to pull our sunpower north, you’re welcome.
Hydrogen is manufactured from natural gas. If you’re thinking of making it by cracking water, that is far more expensive and less efficient than making it from natural gas. Hydrogen is a fossil fuel.
Why do you think there needs to be a master plan? Was there a master plan that resulted in our current energy economy?
It is not as though the current energy environment will just be switched off and replaced with something else. Even if the US went all-in on renewable energy it would take decades to switch over.
I certainly do not think the market can solve all problems but it is a good start. Stop fossil fuel subsidies. They do not need them. Those companies are reporting record profits. Why should you and I be giving them tax money? If there should be subsidies it should be to renewable energy since it will help save the planet for everyone (as opposed to harm it with fossil fuels).
I was thinking more in terms of space. Is there enough space on your roof to hold all those solar panels?
Being in total ignorance, for all I know you could need to blanket a football field to power a house and two cars. If it could all fit on a roof, however, then I might have some ideas on where we could move those fossil fuel subsidies to.
My neighborhood is thick with trees, and we had been* frequently losing power for long stretches after big storms knocked down a bunch of trees. So I’m not really in love with the concept of a connected grid to begin with. Self-sufficient housing strikes me as a worthy goal even apart from going green.
*In fairness they cut down a shitload of trees last time, so now it’s been a couple years since our last power outage. Still…
Depends on how it is produced:
Electricity can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This technology is well developed and available commercially, and systems that can efficiently use renewable power—for example, wind, geothermal, or solar—are being developed. SOURCE
I don’t understand. You’re saying that because we won a war with grreat effort, we will just ‘figure out’ a way to produce all the energy we need without greenhouse gases, even though no one knows how to do that today?
That’s hand-waving. It’s not a plan. It’s cross-your-fingers-and-hope-we-don’t-die.
Certainly roof-top solar has a place. As does home storage batteries. But that role is to protect individuals from grid failures. Rooftop solar is quite inefficient. Have a look at this link to the city of Edmonton’s solar program, which incentivizes people to install rooftop solar:
https://homes.changeforclimate.ca/solar-rebate-program/
Scroll halfway down that page to ‘Edmonton Solar installations over time’. The bars are the capacity installed, and the line graph is actual power generated.
The first thing to note is the radical difference between winter and summer. For example, this last January we had 23,234 KW of installed capacity on rooftops. But the actual power generated over the entire month was 15,424 kWh. That’s less than one hour of full output for the entire month. On the other hand, in June we had 26,775 KW of installed capacity and produced 1,474,074 kWh, or about 55 hours equivalent of full capacity. That is a MASSIVE difference. If you size your solar system to provide enough power for you in summer it will provide next to none in the darkness of winter - when you need it most in Canada.
Or another way of looking at it, a solar roof in Edmonton generated on average only 15 kWh of energy in January, which would power the average solar home for less than 12 hours. That’s for the entire month. No batteries can make up for that.
Also, homes here are heated by natural gas, which I haven’t even talked about. If we have to do away with that, We need another 10 GJ for each home to to replace natural gas heat. That’s another 2778 kWh per month. The average rooftop solar system would only heat your home for about 3.88 hours in January - for the entire month.
Finally, residential power is only a fraction of the electricity used in Alberta. Rooftop solar does nothing for industry.
The reason rooftop solar is so bad in Alberta is because of several reasons -at our latitude, optimum panel placement is due south, and angled at 55 degrees. If your roof is angled less than that (and all of them are), you lose efficiency. If your roof isn’t facing south, you lose efficiency. If there are trees or other obstacles in the path of the sun, you lose efficiency.
Most homes here do not have enough south-facing roof space for a solar system, so the panels get applied to all roof surfaces no matter which way they are facing, which reduces efficiency even more. Then there are the periods when the roof is covered in snow. In some places the snow melts fairly quickly. In a deep freeze in Canada, it does not. That’s probably why solar was so pathetic in Edmonton in January.
Solar providers and the government lie about how much power you can expect, because they use the simple formula of sunlight hours per month * installed capacity. There’s a lot more to it than that as you can see by the actual numbers for power generated.
Solar works much better in the southern US and Australia. For northern Europe, Canada, and the northern US it is very inefficient. More so on rooftops.
Can’t do it. Even if you dedicated your splar system to JUST charging your car, an entire month’s output in January would only charge a Tesla about 1/5 of one battery, assuming you used the power for nothing else.
A Tesla Model 3, one of the most efficient EVs, uses 14.9 kWh/100km. If you drive 16,000 km per year (which I believe is average), that’s roughly 150 kWh per month to charge your car. A 5kW solar system in June could have done it, and left you with about 75 kWh of electricity for the month. - enough for two or three days of power. In Janurary, it wouldn’t even give you 1/10 of the power you need for just the car.
The problem is not generating power on sunny, breezy days in summer. Germany can produce more than 100% of its power from renewables under those conditions. The problem is finding power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
OK, here’s one.
I haven’t read most of it – there’s a great deal of it, especially what with the updates and appendices. But you’re certainly welcome to do so.
– It’s quite possible that it’s too late and we’re now screwed whatever we do. But you need to compare the damages to continuing burning fossil fuels until and unless we get a perfect alternative to the damages from doing our best to stop doing so. Not to look only at the damages from the latter in isolation.
I tell you what: you open a hydrogen filling station with hydrogen made from water. I’ll open a hydrogen filling station next door with hydrogen made from natural gas. My price will always be lower than yours, because my production costs are always lower than yours. How long can you stay in business?
As the post I was responding to was talking about the degree of effort that the move to clean energy would take, I was talking to that aspect of things.
So: click through to the article. Click from there to the Otherlab site. Click from there to rewiringamerica.org.
From there you can get the details from:
It’s a free download. I’m reading through it at the moment. Here’s a few highlights:
- It can be done today, using current technology, with renewables, batteries, and a smart distribution network. You assert it isn’t known how to do it today - Griffith does the work and says it can.
- It will take a lot - a mandate is necessary. The free market no longer has the time to do its magic. It will have to work within the constraints of requirements that specify that no fossil fuel can be used for anything that can be done with electricity.
- Anything that uses fossil fuel will have to be taken off the market at the earliest possible opportunity, and replaced by its electrical equivalent. Cars. Furnaces. Stoves. Dryers. Chain saws. Leaf blowers. Everything.
- By electrifying, we use less energy. It’s more efficient to generate a KwH on your roof, put it into your electrical car’s batttery, and then use it to drive than it is to explore for oil, pump it, refine it, transport it to a gas station, drive your car there to fill up, and then lose most of the energy content of the gas as waste heat.
- You should take a look at Chapter 7, where he discusses the challenges with making a renewable grid reliable 24/7/365, and what a “battery” means.
- Chapter 8 is about financing the transition, and how to deal with the economic issue of fossil fuel company stranded assets. (Short answer - prep for a buyout)
So take a look, but stop bellyaching about the lack of a plan.
We have an 1800 square foot ranch house. Our roof has a standard centerline ridge with a 30-degree slant - so, just a couple degrees from the theoretical optimum for our latitude, close enough that we mounted the panels almost flush with the roof. Thirteen panels in our current system, and we could double that on the roof we have - adding another 6-8 panels on top of that to keep cars charged would require a mount from the ridge up, which would be more expensive but not prohibitively so. The neighbors across the street might be mad because we would interfere with their view if we did so, but we could probably mount them in a way that would put them in front of our backyard tree.
Keep in mind, again, that our panels get over 300 days of sun a year. Going solar here is the no-brainiest no-brainer in existence.
Recently there was an idea to get even more solar power from basically the same footprint. Or being able to put them in places you otherwise couldn’t.
Install some bifacial panels vertically, oriented east-west. Bifacial panels have cells on both sides, whereas the more common ones only have them on one side. By orienting them E-W, they generate power in the early morning and late afternoon when the south-facing ones don’t generate much electricity. So you can generate more juice without taking up more real estate.
To @Sam_Stone 's point, we have three energy grids in the US that carry electricity, natural gas, and liquid hydrocarbons in roughly equal amounts. Gas and liquids are easier to move long-distance and store, and their infrastructure is more and differently resilient to adverse weather. Replacing one or both of those with electricity means building a second or third electrical grid. And even a one-for-one (on an energy basis) replacement opens up serious health and safety ramifications wrt adverse weather events.
“Green” options for preserving the existing gas and liquid infrastructure include using new generating capacity to make gases and liquids. This is, however, ludicrously expensive. But so is a second or third electrical grid, assuming there’s even enough copper available to build it.
We might have the batteries, or at least a pretty good start on them; though there seems to be a fuss about where they’re being made.
I may start a thread for this on its own, most likely in a different forum.
Maybe (presumably I am using solar energy). I probably cannot make as much as you but natural gas prices can fluctuate. A lot. The article below was two weeks ago.
Generally, copper is not used in transmission lines. Too expensive. Most seem to be made of steel reinforced aluminum. cite
Like I said before, the mismanagement about the changes that can be done and are not done as needed in the US, means that China will eat our lunch.
China is, of course, relying on coal a lot now, but at the same time they are also deploying non-CO2 emissions energy technology like that at an accelerated pace. They are more likely to figure out how to wean out of opium fossil fuels. And then influence other nations that want to do a similar thing, while we will not be there thanks to a lack of will.
I just got notified my electric rate is going up 70% in September. Electricity costs vary too. On average, my fossil hydrogen will always be cheaper than your green hydrogen.
This is correct; however, the crowd I run with (as well as whoever assembled the wikipedia article below) use a more expansive definition tham just the transmission system.
That said, I shouldn’t have mentioned any specific material because can’t tell you that copper is the chief bottleneck. There are plenty of contenders. Maybe it’s getting permits. That one is an issue that might deserve its own thread if I knew enough about it to start one.