I have always wondered, certain countries in the world where there is plenty of sunshine, why have they not invested enough into finding ways of tapping the unlimited source of energy they have - THE SUN…
I would have thought, in countries such as india and africa (even in USA like nevada, california and the southern belt), they should be able to meet all their electricity needs solely through Solar Power…They should have invested billions into finding a much much much more efficient way of harnessing the sun;s energy…Why has this not happened?
Very simple. Trapping, harnessing, and storing the Sun’s energy is new technology. Some of it doesn’t work very well - or at least not very efficiently.
You are right to ask the question and I’d expect to see some new and novel ways soon. I understand some US solar companies have gone out of business which suggests its not all beer and roses. There is also a glut of solar panels on the market which indicates buyers have cooled off.
You know the most efficient solar technology? Plants. And algae.
If you have ideas as to how a " much much much more efficient way of harnessing the sun;s energy" could work, please share. There are a lot of very smart people trying to get filthy rich off just such an innovation.
Investing billions to discover such a thing is not cost efficient if conventional sources are meeting their energy needs for less than that.
There’s already at least one plan to build a vast solar plant in North Africa to supply power to Europe. And there are several large-scale solar plants in the western US, including one big one to supply 377 megawatts.
Germany gets over 20% of its power from solar even though their sunlight level is similar to Alaska’s. The article notes that solar power equipment is historically expensive, but beginning to drop in price.
There is a glut, but it is the result of overcapacity on the production side (Chinese manufacturers until recently had access to easy funding for building solar panel production capacity), not a slackening of demand on a global basis.
Europe has seen a slow down in installations because of greatly reduced subsidies (for several years Germany was the global leader in installations because of a generous subsidy scheme), but the slack is more than being taken up by China (which has a pollution problem, as well as a lot of solar panel factory workers it wants to keep employed) and Japan (because of the nuclear power plant disaster).
India and the U.S. (finally) are also starting to pick up the pace.
The last two years, the price of solar panels has plummeted, which is stimulating demand, just as you would expect from fundamental economics.
So basically, it is only just recently that the costs have come down to the point where solar can make sense on an economic basis, at least in some markets.
Another factor holding solar power back is the current lack of an efficient and economic way to store the power that is generated for use in times when sunshine is diminished or at night. Until that happens, solar power cannot be a sole power source, only a supplement. I am sure the technology will come along, eventually.
I have heard rumors that long-term thinking, large investment funds are buying up large tracts of desert land in the southwest U.S. precisely for the purpose of building solar farms. Even Warren Buffet is investing in solar farms.
So basically, the investment that you always thought should have been there? It is happening right now.
This. The OP’s implication is that countries like India have invested billions of dollars in something other than solar, or just have billions of dollars lying around that they could invest in solar but choose not to.
Germany has installed solar power panels which, in theory, under optimal conditions, might provide 10% of its power needs. In practice they don’t even get close to that, and they’re actually building more coal power plants and importing power from other countries to actually supply their power needs. The German solar power boom is mostly a scam at the expense of he taxpayers.
Not necessarily. The OPs electricity could be coming from a nuclear plant, or even (if they’re in Iceland) a geothermal plant. Neither are really solar energy. The OP’s food is of course all solar energy.
A giant solar plant is being put up in California. Look at those numbers. It will deploy 170,000 heliostat mirrors focusing solar energy on boilers located on centralized solar power towers. It will take up nearly 10 square miles of desert. And its output is a piddling 392 megawatts - when the sun shines. Piddling? Yes. That wouldn’t make the list of the 100 largest nuclear units in the U.S. Not sites, individual units. There are dozens of sites with 6-10 times that output.
The reason is that while sunlight in unlimited it is also extremely diffuse. That implies two ways to collect it, neither very good. You can try to concentrate it through size and the number of collectors, as in California, or you can use many small collectors for small needs, as on individual buildings. Both have pros and cons. Concentrating it allows for economies of scale to make the hundreds of thousands of units cheaper and selling the power for a maximum. It also allows for ways to keep the plant going if there are clouds for a few hours. But it requires huge amounts of land, environmental damage, and on-site dangers - those towers are literally too bright to look at. Scattering it puts it within the means of millions rather than large companies and lessens the problems involved with collecting and distributing the power. But they can only be auxiliary power supplies, because the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day. And the total cost of individual units will be far more than one concentrated unit for the same amount of power. Keeping the power going when the sun doesn’t shine is the biggest barrier today. We don’t have any good means of storage of electricity.
It’s a whole series of problems, each one difficult. As said, we’re still in the early days of this these technologies - plural - so we don’t know what ingenuity will be brought to the subject in the future, but without a major breakthrough, solar power will also be an auxiliary source not the main one. We need just as many billions and just as much ingenuity thrown at every other source of power simultaneously. And that can’t happen.
Based on current technology, PV arrays intended for large-scale power distribution are not only a waste of money, they consume energy that could otherwise be directly utilized.
Spain made an effort a couple decades ago to be the “greenest” country on earth. The government invested billions of $$ in PV arrays intended for large-scale power distribution. IIRC, it has become a total boondoggle, and they’re abandoning/dismantling many of the PV power plants.
This is pretty much it: In order to collect solar power directly, you need to cover an area that receives as much power from sunlight as you want to collect (in practice, a much larger area than that because of inefficiencies in collection). That intrinsically means either really big collectors, or piddling amounts of power.
But there are some other indirect ways that perform better: Hydroelectric plants are essentially solar power plants that collect from a huge area (basically everywhere sunlight evaporates water that precipitates in the watershed of the dam) without needing to lay down infrastructure everywhere. In Ontario and Quebec, this is so prevalent that “hydro” is a synonym for “electricity”.
Wind farms are similarly “indirect solar that doesn’t need as much space as an equivalent amount of PV cells” that is receiving a lot of development.
Don’t forget, that 10 mi[sup]2[/sup] area is now a huge “dead zone” that is inhospitable to plants & animals for the rest of the forseeable future. Even solar farms have an environmental impact that must be considered.
In addition to the density issue, the biggest issues are energy storage and distribution. Places where there is land and sunshine to spare generally don’t have huge demands for electricity. So, you have to be able to store and transport the energy somehow.
If you’re really interested in questions like this, “End of Oil” is a great book. It was incorrect in it’s main prediction (peak oil, predicted to happen about now, but thanks to fracking it’s pushed quite a ways out), but still covers the big hurdles to alternative energy solutions.
One of the biggest hurdles, according to the book, is that the world economy has a roughly $5 trillion investment in oil infrastructure, and that infrastructure works remarkably well. Investors aren’t likely to be interested in walking away from it. More importantly, any infrastructure to replace it won’t be as simple, and will require a bigger investment (eventually).
I would think that using farm run off that is loaded with nitrogen phosphates to fertilize plants and ponds that could produce sugars which could be converted to easy to store alcohol. The distilling process could be solar powered I would think, it would be slower and take up a lot more space I imagine.
Simple. The sun’s energy is not unlimited. The maximum amount of energy you can gather from the sun is limited to approximately 0.006 barrel-of-oil-equivalents per square meter per day (not including cloudy days).
Put another way, for each barrel of oil consumed daily, you would need a solar panel of a minimum size of approximately 160 square meters (a panel approximately 40 feet on each side) to replace it. Since solar panels are not perfectly efficient, you need to double or triple these numbers, and to make up for cloudy days, probably double or triple it again.
Solar power is just not economically feasible, that’s all there is to it. It takes up too much space relative to the energy produced.
Agree. And the fact that such endeavors require massive amounts of public subsidies to stay afloat is also an indication that it is a total waste of money and energy.
It should be noted, however, that technological advances could one day make PV arrays economically viable for large-scale power production.