People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert.
I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.
So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).
.. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].
What I found cool about the synthetic natural gas, is that Europe already has really good seasonal storage of natural gas. Hence the infrastructure is available for summer-time generation of gas using solar abundance that we use in winter for heating.
To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by stockpiling on seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent production, things will get hairy in winter.
Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.
Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.
Northern Africa has a huge opportunity here - build infra that produces hydrogen gas year round, and then export it to Europe. The Sahara Desert is 8_600_000 km², which I imagine is _very sunny_ all year round.
If we produce considerably more electricity than we can use it becomes essentially free energy at those times. Then it could make sense to convert it into gas instead of extracting gas from the earth. Until then the extracted gas will be cheaper and overall more efficient. Local availability of natural gas can be a problem at times, tough.
Yes, absolutely - the house is a pretty big country side house from 1925, not uncommon in Germany. But (almost) impossible to insulate efficiently. My estimates where €150k to €200k, just for the insulation, windows, and renewed heaters. In comparison, an 'oversized' 70 kWp PV only costs €100k, and also returns some income when not all of the power is used.
The parameters widely differ between country and city: In the country, you usually have space (but lack money), in the city, you lack space but can often work with a pretty good income (= build a new, energy optimized house).
Every house is different. If I build a new house today, of course this would look different.
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
> With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation.
With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's.
You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.
In north-west eu maybe, in south-west not so much; I have had solar for 20 years in different houses in the south and it covers more than enough all year round (we are off grid). During the days, summer and winter, you can switch on whatever as it will never run out; during the night it obviously depends on the amount and quality of batteries. I have had 1 moment without power and that was a rare event for that location: snow covering the solar panels.
You're still seeing a large swing in insolation between summer and winter in SW Europe. You can tilt the PV arrays to increase winter production at the expense of summer (and at expense of overall production); did you do that?
Places without enough sun in the winter, and without enough wind, too, sometimes, will just import power. You might be able to draw down on HVDC transmission lines. But there will also be abundant solar farms in the tropics synthesizing ammonia for export. If the weather prediction says not enough wind, and your tanked ammonia would run low, and you can't book enough transmission line power, you just order a shipment, which will be substantially cheaper than NG, from anybody anywhere.
But you will have overbuilt a great deal of cheap solar capacity, because anytime it generates more than you can use, you can synthesize your own ammonia. First you fill your tanks, and then sell the rest.
In winter, the overbuild means you burn less of it. In summer, the excess ammonia will find an unlimited market because ammonia is so useful. It is fuel, it is fertilizer, it is refrigerant, it is feedstock for myriad chemical processes.
"Just as converting chemical energy in the form of fuel into electricity endures 45-75% thermodynamic losses, converting electricity back into chemical fuels loses 60-70% of the energy in the process. Converting solar power into natural gas only to burn it in a gas turbine power plant could help with long term seasonal energy storage but is so much less cost competitive than other ways to stabilize electricity supply that we should expect this usage modality in, at most, niche cases."
The whole article is basically about the question if solar power will continue to drop in price and if power-to-gas tech can have a similar drop in price. If those two are true then power-to-gas will become economical viable to the point where people could use it to store power produced in the summer to be burned for baseload/winter. It will also mean that pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, in compressed storage, will be is expected to reach a point where they are too cheap the meter.
The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per day.
Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has benefits at their latitude too.
I have a small 5kWp PV at home, with a small lithium storage (8kWh) just to cover my arse in case of outage, since here (French Alps) there is a very big day-night thermal delta it's very good in summer, where at night I just need the VMC in passive mode and A/C only during the day, for the rest it's enough for heating sanitary water almost ONLY from the Sun, winter included, and to run some appliances (dishwasher, washing machine etc) in self-consumption. Doing more is needed for trying to charge an EV from PV during the day, likely the double at minimum, but to heat the house in winter OR:
- I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30k€ at least just to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15k€ at least;
- I need a giant insulated, probably underground for mere easiness of design, pool and PV plant (I do not know how to estimate but surely few swimming pools of water and enough PV to heat it) to store enough heat for the night.
Both options are ridiculously expensive especially since they still NOT give autonomy since they can support day-to-day winter IF the Sun shine enough, witch might but also might not happen. Perhaps in a future H₂ from hydrolysis will be on sale to offer a fuel-cell third option, but I imagine it will be even more expensive.
So far it's still FAR, FAR, FAR, cheaper using the grid + an emergency wood based heating. Long story short I might accept investing (I'm actually in the planning stage) a 15kWp or so PV for an EV charging (WFH so without daily car usage) but trying more is just money gifted to some company pocket. Oh BTW that's JUST for private homes. We also have public buildings AND industry...
The question is, if complete energy autonomy is even that desirable. From an economic perspective I think it makes sense to use the grid as a kind of battery. Sell surplus energy to the grid in summer, buy it back in winter (ideally renewable) and let the utilities deal with the headache of balancing supply/demand and storage.
Also, solar panel efficiency is still increasing at a steady pace. A gain of 50% compared to the average efficiency of currently sold panels seems to be achievable in a couple of years. 20% vs. 30% could be all you need to improve your calculation.
> I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
I know there are sun-following installations but those need expensive mechanics and control systems. Aren't there middle-ground solutions that can be manually adjusted twice a year?
I think with 30kWp you should be able to heat enough sand to make it over the winter. It's a matter of space and finding someone to build you that heat storage.
Currently, it is cheaper though to "sell" the electricity in summer and "buy" it back in winter (even if it is at 10x the price I sold it for). Compared to private long term storage solutions. Most long term electricity storage solutions will yield electricity at prices above 80c/kWh here (even lithium ion is currently around 50 to 70c, if you calculate 10,000 hrs average lifetime of house batteries). And you cannot use lithium ion for long term storage, you would need H2, or heat storage solutions.
30KW STC rating of PV panels does not product much cumulative kWh at all in December and January at latitudes 40+. Forget the sand he just doesn't have the watt hours to run electric heaters at all.
> I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass.
Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules.
Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.
Just wondering, isn’t it viable to have Solar arrays in the Sahara/equator regions and have the power transmitted to temperate zones? Is the transmission the issue? Is it politics? Super conductors? I’d love to know why we can’t have a follow the sun global grid…
The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.
The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places.
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping.
As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough renewables generation, considering existing curtailment), battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build, Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin.
Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.
> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”
If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time (for building heating purposes).
Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor).
Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
While your house wiring is typically copper, transmission and distribution wiring isn't. That's very-often aluminum. And as you point out, we make a huge amount of the stuff.
I doubt copper would be used in that kind of thing. It's worse, but not that much worse.
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
Superconducting power transmission was first implemented back in 2014 [1]. Some progress has been made since then [2].
I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.
And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.
Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
We don’t need to shift all necessary electricity from one end of the earth to the other right? Just the shortfall that a large number of batteries cannot deal with overnight.
I'm curious if anyone knows the cost/benefit analysis of HVDC over aluminum cables versus using high-temperature superconductors like ReBCO tape. Maybe supply of yttrium is a bottleneck preventing large-scale use of ReBCO?
Did you take into account that transmission cables are usually hollow? Due to the skin effect, most current runs through the edge of a cable, so by hollowing out the cable you can remove a part that doesn't carry much current.
Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.
Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of the meat here.
> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."
Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.
> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
I've seen people saying "Alaska shows that nuclear is needed, as wind/solar don't work well there." They don't mention that the average power level on the largest grid in Alaska is just 600 MW. And Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, the northern half of Canada.
The article we're commenting on is about a moderately efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are: you manufacture methane in the sunny place and then ship it to where the load is, either through a pipeline, through a liquefaction terminal, or after an additional process step such as hydroxylating it into methanol.
This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
> In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity
All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.
Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here.
I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.
Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
Germany cancelled projects in Africa with HVDC cables up-continent when solar panel cost dropped to the point that they can just buy enough local panels to meet power needs.
Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
>a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables
I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)
At current prices, it's already worth fully solar individually... just expensive up front. Batteries and transmission are so expensive it's worth just installing MOAR solar. Connecting to the grid would be $1k/year so (depending on rate of return) it takes ~20years to pay off, which is right around the warrantee period.
Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.
I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
>The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe
It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.
This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
We wouldn't want to import all our electricity from one country anyway, even if that country wasn't quite as unstable as Libya.
A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.
This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km, comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each, and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them, that's 2e5 truck loads.
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
> The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?
Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline supplies.
if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.
not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
> if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
My point was that maybe we should transport the electricity to where it needs to be used over high voltage long distance lines, rather than running an artificial hydrocarbon fuel generation process, storing it in tanks or pipelines, and then sending it to where it needs to be used, and feeding it into combustion engines.
But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported using our existing infrastructure...
Even places that are not very sunny get a preposterous amount of sun energy per square meter and solar is in any case to be synergistically combined with wind energy. This is a total non-concern, nobody needs to start building in Libya of all places.
There is another such project going on now, to connect Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector. Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this stage).
One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy. Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to mention that countries want to be energy independent, which would be another improvement to the situation we are currently in.
For places and times without sun there are other solutions such as natural gas. We are not trying to entirely eliminate all uses of fossil fuels for energy; just reduce them drastically where practical. There is also nuclear (longer time scale), hydro, wind, batteries, and transmission lines, among others.
You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
>> I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.
I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
But it seems they need places with ample sunshine and water to electrolyze. That rules out the American west, the Sahara, etc. If they can use seawater, then arid coastal areas could work.
On one hand it’s an interesting engineering challenge, but I am always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an ecosystem with glass is “good for the environment”. It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
Hundreds of square km is not a lot, and the ecosystems where these systems would be installed are typically not rich havens of life. The US's power consumption would require about 6000-9000 sq km of solar panels (assuming ~15% efficiency) For comparison in the US there are about 13000-33000 sq km of parking lots, 93000 sq km of alfalfa cultivation, 69000 sq km of fallow agricultural land, and the mojave desert is about 124000 sq km. Yeah with gross mismanagement you might jeopardize the survival of some rare lizard or something, but it's a very far cry from a silicon wasteland.
It'a really weird but there's a surprisingly growing base of farming amid a solar farm, where apparently many plants just cant stand the pure sun & benefit from some periodic shade during the day. I dont know how much I believe it but combined agriculture/solar use seems perhaps legit to be a thing.
Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
Matter of interpretation. Is humanity at all good for the environment? Some would say no. Solar is clean and deserts are mostly, well, deserts. And climate change seems much worse than having a tiny bit of our deserts being used for PV farms.
I'm not saying pave over the mojave desert with PV, exactly, rather that a dry salt pan or ecosystem that has an absolute minimum of flora and fauna would be preferable.
> It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
Wait until you hear about how we invented synthetic fertilizer and added 5 billion humans in as many as 100 years. Won't somebody think of the ecosystem!
We’ve already desertified tens of thousands of square km of land into parking lots / heat sinks. We could start by shading those abominations with solar panels.
This kind of energy infrastructure is only build in China at the moment. High voltage DC, solar& battery manufacturing, solar installation, new nuclear plants
> The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances
This is undesirable in the same way shipping water via trucks is a lot less efficient than using pipes.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
Solar fans really want to cover entire countries in panels, instead of just building nuclear power
"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.
We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up
Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.
Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever?
Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.
Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN
I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless.
Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.
The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
> Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure.
Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
> Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person
> Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.
> The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem
Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?
If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
> Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.
I appreciate this all-too-rare take. It concerns me that it's so popular to be negative. I believe a lot more good can come about with a positive attitude -- honest and critical at times, yes, but at some point you just gotta put your boots on and get to work.
You have it backwards. Solar panels are a fungible commodity good with no differentiation besides quality and cost. The financial incentive points strongly in the direction of longevity.
So, the good news is that we can generate all the power we will ever need from the sun using cheap solar panels that will last a very long time.
You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.
Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.
Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.
Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.
Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?
Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.
The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.
I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.
> Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
> Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big barrier is political.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details.
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air. There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions of years ago that's creating the excess.
Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad idea.
I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
While desalination requires disposing of all the waterborne particulate, the water can sometimes be precious enough that we bear it. I heard a radio report yesterday [0] about how investing in desalination helped mitigate USA CA Catalina Island's direly depleted resivoir. That's not to say that brine treatment or disposal isn't costly, more that - so long as people are committed to living in dry areas and can afford to, they will pressure their local governments to keep the area habitable.
This comes up a lot when desalination is mentioned. Think of the pacific as a bucket of water. And desalinating all the water we ever need adds up to tiny fraction of a drop of water in comparison. Now the brine is an even tinier fraction of that drop that goes back in the bucket. What does it do to ppm counts of things like salt? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.
Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array, a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.
We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the phenomenon of “curtailment” where we can’t use solar power when and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
tbh i just skip solar panels. it's such a grind. by the time i can make them at scale, i need so many of them, and i hate placing them. even with pretty OP construction bots it's not worth the effort IMO.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Solar power in Factorio pairs really well with spidertron. You can give it a bunch of bots, and an automated production line and it just builds itself. The only hard part is to make sure to always keep power growing rather than only expanding when you need more power.
Real life will probably move on from panels, too. PV will be made on big rolls of plastic film (like mylar or kapton), laid out on the ground. Think 3 meters wide by a kilometre long.
The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically.
Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis.
Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.
Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy.
But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios...
Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject.
What trend makes you think nuclear is going to make a paradigm shift?
I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.
Readit News
I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).
Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.
So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).
.. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].
[1]: https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX
[2]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/
To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by stockpiling on seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent production, things will get hairy in winter.
Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.
Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.
Dead Comment
I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is overkill for them.
The parameters widely differ between country and city: In the country, you usually have space (but lack money), in the city, you lack space but can often work with a pretty good income (= build a new, energy optimized house).
Every house is different. If I build a new house today, of course this would look different.
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's.
You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.
But you will have overbuilt a great deal of cheap solar capacity, because anytime it generates more than you can use, you can synthesize your own ammonia. First you fill your tanks, and then sell the rest.
In winter, the overbuild means you burn less of it. In summer, the excess ammonia will find an unlimited market because ammonia is so useful. It is fuel, it is fertilizer, it is refrigerant, it is feedstock for myriad chemical processes.
Produce excess methane gas in summer, store with existing infrastructure, burn it for baseload/winter.
"Just as converting chemical energy in the form of fuel into electricity endures 45-75% thermodynamic losses, converting electricity back into chemical fuels loses 60-70% of the energy in the process. Converting solar power into natural gas only to burn it in a gas turbine power plant could help with long term seasonal energy storage but is so much less cost competitive than other ways to stabilize electricity supply that we should expect this usage modality in, at most, niche cases."
Of course we are not there now. 2030 maybe? 2040?
isn't real
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S26669552220002...
The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per day.
Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has benefits at their latitude too.
- I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30k€ at least just to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15k€ at least;
- I need a giant insulated, probably underground for mere easiness of design, pool and PV plant (I do not know how to estimate but surely few swimming pools of water and enough PV to heat it) to store enough heat for the night.
Both options are ridiculously expensive especially since they still NOT give autonomy since they can support day-to-day winter IF the Sun shine enough, witch might but also might not happen. Perhaps in a future H₂ from hydrolysis will be on sale to offer a fuel-cell third option, but I imagine it will be even more expensive.
So far it's still FAR, FAR, FAR, cheaper using the grid + an emergency wood based heating. Long story short I might accept investing (I'm actually in the planning stage) a 15kWp or so PV for an EV charging (WFH so without daily car usage) but trying more is just money gifted to some company pocket. Oh BTW that's JUST for private homes. We also have public buildings AND industry...
Also, solar panel efficiency is still increasing at a steady pace. A gain of 50% compared to the average efficiency of currently sold panels seems to be achievable in a couple of years. 20% vs. 30% could be all you need to improve your calculation.
I know there are sun-following installations but those need expensive mechanics and control systems. Aren't there middle-ground solutions that can be manually adjusted twice a year?
Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass.
Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules.
Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.
Utility level solar is much more effective too of course.
For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.
I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.
The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.
https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”
https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...
Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).
Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.
I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.
[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-...
[2]: https://energycentral.com/news/shanghai-opens-world-leading-...
You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.
That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.
And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.
Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023
"""
Being developed
> "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."
Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.
> "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
> "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.
In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.
I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.
Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)
Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.
I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?
The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.
This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu...
Annualized, that's an average power of 33.5 GW.
On http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see in the yearly demand view that peak demand for the year was under 40 GW.
This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.
The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)
The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?
Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.
not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
One such project being built currently: https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu...
More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of batteries
The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.
I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin
creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has ecological costs
in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the percentage of electricity right now that is generated using gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.
No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.
This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.
Two points about that:
- existing energy sources already do a huge amount of damage to land (and in places like West Virginia, particularly environmentally sensitive land)
- that's land that can already be converted to solar without significant harm being done (the harm has already been done)
[1]: https://www.gem.wiki/The_footprint_of_coal
I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.
Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
Dead Comment
"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.
We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up
Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.
People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.
It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.
Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.
Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN
Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?
> Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person
Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.
It's incredibly common.
Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?
If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)
Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.
Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening, and it's caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.
Those weren’t caused by the species themselves though
You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.
Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.
Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.
Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.
Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.
I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.
Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.
Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?
Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.
The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.
I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.
Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.
Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
Dead Comment
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
As you said, this trend will keep on going.
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-po...
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
Yeah, Jerry Pournelle used to say on this topic, "it's raining soup, and we're too stupid to hold out a bowl."
Well, now we're at least holding out a few soup spoons, and making some more every year.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis.
Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.
Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy.
But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios...
Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject.
[1]: Chapter on solar: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml
The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong.
OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.
You're right though that the book is not up to date, and getting long in the tooth in some aspects.
I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.