So don’t get it all from solar.
Eh…I wouldn’t be so blithe in repeating that meme. I mean, for solid economic reasons, even in a world with appropriate carbon taxes (or cap and trade, which is almost the same thing), there would still be other forms of energy. For some applications, nothing but fossil fuels or at least biofuel will do. (rockets, airliners). Hydro and wind, of course.
But think it through a little more. Even a nuclear winter only reduces the total insolation by about half. After a nuclear war, frankly, most industries aren’t going to be producing anyway. Nobody is going to be travelling unnecessarily. Basically, at half power output, you’d still be fine. You’d have much bigger problems.
A bigger issue with solar is on isolated islands like Puerto Rico. There, solar makes great economic sense, but the problem is, big storms could in principle rip up all the panels while it would leave intact backup generators in concrete armored buildings. So you would still need fossil fuel backup.
I thought you said “many”, not one, and I was hoping for instances where it was actually running. Also, I didn’t see in the article that it said it was unsubsidized.
Regards,
Shodan
It is unsubsidized, that is well known. Those are feed in bids.
The recent bids for the MASEN also are similar.
the bank I work for has begun in the past three years to extend even credit to small-scale (double digits megawatts)projects as the pricing is 100 percent grid competitive now sans subventions for the projects in mediterranean region levels of insolation. some years ago they would never approve the investment credit for such a thing, now yes. The pricing is better for the utility scale.
the cost of the capital has become vastly cheaper in the past five years as the perception of risk for the technology and for the execution of the projects has decreased greatly, and greater and greater amounts of capital become interested.
There is no reason to doubt that the solar in high insolation environments is now highly competitive, no non political reasoon at least.
Knock off this bullshit. If you want to take shots at another poster, the Pit is where you should go.
[/moderating]
Uh, I thought that being clueless was a synonym of ignorance, If that is not the case then I apologize. I suspect is then another issue of me looking at the dictionary or thesaurus first items or definitions and not others.
In any case I do remember that the past discussion was talking about about a poster that was not Shodan and it did go for pages showing that while he may had experience on the costs of solar panels back in the 70’s, many other posters besides me clearly showed him that the prices had taken a nose dive compared to 30 or even 15 years ago.
AFAICR this chart from Bloomberg was linked to to to show that dramatic change:
The point was that that poster (again, not Shodan) never acknowledged the changes. We will see how Shodan does here.
AFAICR that past poster has not showed up again, and I just found that for some reason it is really hard for me now to find that past conversation and pit a poster that is not here anymore.
The point remains though that there are indeed a lot of items that many on the right are using to to get many of their opinions wrong. And this is just another example that I noticed many times before, time lines or the march of time is hard to get by some on the right.
I’m not going to produce a Google vomit for you. Your request for “where it’s actually running” is particularly silly, as it makes you sound like you don’t believe the technology works at all. The project I linked to had multiple bids under 3 cents/kW-h, and also mentions the Sweihan project, again at <3c. These are all below typical coal prices.
Ramira points out another big advantage of solar–it scales extremely well. If capital is tight, you can still fund smaller projects. Finding the funds for an $8B nuclear project is challenging even at the best of times.
The beauty of solar fields, is that they can be produced from sand, by solar-powered robots– who can make more solar-powered robots that do the same.
Such robots could covert all deserts of the world into a global power-grid, producing around 8.64 E+22J.
The world currently consumes 5.67E+20 joules, so such a grid would produce about 1500 times the world’s current energy-needs, while transforming useless desert into valuable renewable-energy sources-- for no construction-cost whatsoever, beyond the initial robots.
And what’s more, we could then proceed to deploy such technology on other planets, mainly Mercury and the moon, to make them quite habitable in a short time.
So I’d say yes, solar power is definitely in its infancy.
And this is not science-fiction; self-replicating robots are currently under development, but the key is economic viability, which solar power can provide greater than in any other area.
Correction to above: the solar-grid in question would produce not 1500 times current energy-consumption, but 55 *thousand. *
Even better!
Well if you wanna be a prepper, go ahead.
However I’ve just disclosed how we could run the entire world on solar power for virtually zero expense, even in capital outlay; therefore it would be a good idea to work exclusively on that UFN.
Likewise, we could always move to other planets utilizing the same R&D.
It just so happens that I’ve ordered matching solar solar bots for my family this year.
- How did you reach those figures?
- Where is this research on self-replicating robots being done?
Which planet(s) would you recommend?
Mercy and the Moon would be best: Mercury, because it gets the most sun, and the moon because it’s closest. They also have the resources to provide oxygen atmospheres indoors.
Other planets like Mars etc. might require nuclear power-plants, or fusion if and when it’s available; but those fuels are also available on those planets.
However the proper testing-ground for self-replicating solarbots, would be the Earth’s deserts, where we can research and develop them.
As noted here: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2005/05/researchers-build-robot-can-reproduce
Clearly there’s not much demand for these at present, and so there won’t be much R&D in producing them just for the hell of it; however if they can convert Earth’s deserts into profitable solar-fields, at minimal cost, then the benefit could clearly exceed the cost in terms of R&D and other investment in the project.
Once they work here on Earth, and the industry is established, we can launch a few of them onto other planets to do their work, and prepare them for human habitation.
This certainly is the way to go, if possible, since the only alternative is sending equipment from Earth at $17,000/kg just to launch it. Elon Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but that’s a long way to go just to live in few metal igloos off-world, when robots could completely metropolize entire planet-surfaces for less cost.
- Wikipedia, as well as the simple fact that 1kwh = 3.6e+6J
- Cornell U. and other places http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a22876/explore-galaxy-with-self-replicating-robots/
However I’m always careful to distinguish state-of-the-art from pie-in-the-sky.
If you’re interested in the exact calcs, here they are:
2.00E+16 total sq.m = total area of Earth’s deserts
*4.20E+6 J /sq.m/day produced by solar energy
*365 days/year
= 3.15E+25 Joules/year produced by Earth’s deserts
In contrast: Total power consumed by Earth: 5.27E+20 J/year ( World energy supply and consumption - Wikipedia )
= ~60,000 times as much.
The problem I see with Solar Energy is that people expect it to replace our existing infrastructure. It won’t. At best, it will only augment it.
Look at heating for houses, shops, and factories. Currently, natural gas is the cheapest, most cost effective way to accomplish this. Now, imagine each house, shop, and factory with passive heat solar absorption panels on the roof. Nothing fancy, just black panels with an oil (silicon) fluid running through them, picking up heat. Insulated from the cold, the oil could get quite hot and used for heating just by putting a radiator in the air handler. Sure, it wouldn’t provide enough heat to provide all the heating needed, but it could lower the demand for natural gas, particularly when the sun was shining. On warmer days, the heated fluid could be stored in thermally insulated tanks to provide heat when the sun had set. Now, it is unrealistic to expect such a system to provide 100% of the energy needed to heat these places, but it could knock a bit dent in the amount of natural gas currently being used.
Similarly, look at cooling (air conditioning). The same panels and heat absorption fluid could be used to drive absorption coolers, not to replace air conditioners, but to augment them. That is, reduce the amount of heat load the (electrically driven) compressor driven system has to handle. That is, a smaller unit could serve the same purpose or, more realistically, the unit would not have to run as long to maintain the cooler temperature. That way, the capacity would be there on cloudy, muggy days where the “help” from the solar unit wasn’t there. Such a system is even more attractive when you realize it would provide a bigger boost when it is needed the most, when the solar radiation is greatest.
Neither of these systems would be adequate to provide for all the heating or cooling requirements of homes, shops, or factories, so if you were looking for a replacement for our current technology, they really wouldn’t be an effective solution. However, such systems could, realistically, reduce our load on the existing technology by, what, 20%- 40%? Wouldn’t that be a significant enough contribution to pay for the cost of implementation? Where I live (US Southeast), my cost for heating/cooling the house runs about $200/month. In March/April and September/November when heating and cooling requirements are essentially non-existent, but such a system would be effective at a price point around $2500 (based on a 5 years). Assuming maintenance costs less than the existing equipment, you might even be able to justify a 10-year lifespan.
Such systems, while not able to reach a 100% solar replacement for existing systems, are both realistic and, perhaps, even cost effective, even without draconian and unfair implementation of “carbon tax incentives” being offered. Get the wealthy pay for the technology, so the hoi palloi can use it to make their lives better.
It wouldn’t be efficient, since the amount of steady sunlight is inversely proportional to the need for energy, in most cases.
That’s why I think converting the world’s deserts into a superconducting solar-field and global power-grid, would be a better option-- and as I explained, we’d only need about 1/50,000th of it, to supply all our current energy-needs… and it could practically convert itself.
Who would have the authority to do such a thing?
ISTM the current (heh :)) revival of this thread has morphed into a virtual duplicate of this other recent thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=842122
Sarah’s ideas here are essentially the same as SamuelA’s in the other thread. With similar objections. The other thread has both sides already fleshed out in more detail.
In summary: there is no doubt total planetary insolation exceeds total human energy use by several orders of magnitude. But that’s by far *not *the largest obstacle to adopting massive scale solar power. The other obstacles are the hard ones. So if there is to be progress, those other challenges need to be identified, prioritized, and overcome.
No matter how many decimal places are used in the claim, simply repeating “there’s enough insolation” accomplishes not quite exactly zero.