What Would It Take To Go 100% Solar?
Feel free to prove or disprove this guy's numbers.
Our population is only 324,000,000. Only? Isn't that the third-largest in the world? Sure, a quarter of #1 and #2, but still three hundred and twenty-four million people! India has a billion people more than the U.S., but uses less than half of the electricity. Ah yes, the Indian utopia, where everyone cooks with solar ovens and has r100 insulation! I went to see how many homes even have electricity and this popped up first: 70% of India does not have access to toilets. Supposedly all 600,000 villages in India have electricity, but those are villages, not necessarily every home in each village. "World Bank figures show around 200 million people in India still lack access to electricity." India is not a good example. They claim that all of Iceland's energy is renewable, except for cars, which are difficult to electrify. [Tesla has entered the chat] We could use geothermal in the U.S., but it would destroy river ecosystems and intrude on national parks. If we say the U.S. uses 1.21 4,000,000 gigawatts and 3 acres per gigawatt-hour, we would need about 12,000,000 acres of land, but the U.S. is 2,400,000,000 acres, so we would need 0.5% of the land area of the U.S., or the space of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. The detail that got my attention is "According to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, over 25 million acres of land in the U.S. alone are leased by oil and gas companies, over twice the area solar would require, while only providing 66% of our energy demand. If we keep producing oil to sell to finance solar installation [wait, what?!], "Every year the U.S. Federal government offers up leases on federal land to oil and gas companies in the form of auctions. In 2017, the amount of land offered up reached nearly 12 million acres, but less than 800,000 acres received bids, so over 11,000,000 acres are still available, that the government already owns, but is not using. In the U.S., over 21 million acres are used to grow corn with the specific purpose of converting it into ethanol to be used as a gasoline substitute. In fact, corn grown for ethanol production is actually the second-largest use of corn in the country [...] and accounts for 27% of all the corn we grow." They say the southwest would be the ideal location to build solar farms, because the south receives the most sun, the west receives less precipitation, and the government owns far more land in the west than the east. They estimate that it would cost $24 trillion dollars, while the U.S. GDP is $19 trillion. This would cost ten times as much as the war in Iraq. Immediate problems:
What else? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czL0ZSscbsM |
The land may not receive a bid because it may not have oil or be economical to extract oil from, it may be too difficult to get to, the terrain may suck, there may not be any roads, no accessible electricity, it may be too far away from the market.
Some of it may be in Alaska, which means it's useless for solar at least several months of the year. Some of those other factors effect solar farms such as no truck access or no near by power lines. A good rebuildable energy site needs to have a few things. Most importantly an abundance of the free energy desired, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric. It needs to be big truck accessible, concrete truck accessible, there needs to be a market or transmission line tie in near by and the land needs to be obtainable by purchasing or lease. Same goes for the power lines. If a hundred miles of power lines need to be built the budget for the power lines starts to be the bulk of the cost. The longer the power line, the bigger the farm the more nimby useful idiots get activated. Another problem is if the area is too far away for a concrete truck to get to that will at least quadruple your concrete bill. |
New York State just passed a bill to make it carbon free or some such thing by 2050. I won't live to see it and am quite skeptical knowing the parties involved. We currently have major hydroelectric facilities in Niagara Falls and Massena. A few nuclear plants are still in operation. We produce natural gas and have wind farms. The electrical grid is barely adequate now with exceptional demand causing failures. We have snow cover from November to April. Corning Inc. uses large amounts of natural gas to produce glass and the substrates for catalytic converters. Solar farms are starting up in rural communities for residential use. We have forests and agriculture that absorbs carbon dioxide. The fundamental question is what if anything will make a measurable difference or is this simply a political exercise to wrest control of the economy.
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Roll-to-roll plastic foil photovoltaics. Solar arrays on reservoirs of water to reduce evaporation. Carbon-negative concrete. Bio-char everywhere and all the time. |
The obvious problem is that you need some way to store the electricity at night, or during cloudy periods.
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Right now there is barely enough battery materials to produce a few percent of new cars as electric. Hyundai had to halt production on their electric vehicles this summer because they ran out of batteries. |
People keep saying things like "batteries have three times the capacity for one-third the price compared to three years ago."
It still seems like we are still pretty far from where we need to be. |
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Then the plan to get all electrical power from them is flawed.
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Politics is downstream from culture. The solution will come from science and engineering rather than political fiat. |
The politicians appear to be more of a problem than a solution.
This is what happens when you mix politics and electricity. It all started when they closed NH Yankee nuclear power station for political, ND, nimby reasons. And here we are today: https://www.pressherald.com/2019/07/...cmp-customers/ |
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Actually, I am not sure that I would agree with what an A.I. decides is best for me. It might just decide that we are a virus. |
We need to go to a MIX of renewable energy sources at least 3, plus storage is what makes sense.
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People often say that we need to combine random solar and random wind. What would be your recommendation for a third source, and is it consistent? :)
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Sun is anything but random. Wind is quite predictable, and in some places, nearly constant.
Biogas is a good solution - methane from sewage, farm waste, trash, etc. - can be stored and used to cover what grid storage cannot. |
The sewage itself can create electricity. Do you think you could combine the technologies? https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...ell-37647.html
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Moon Power!
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Yeah, I keep thinking moon power is the most consistent, and as an added bonus might help dampen the eb and flow of tides.
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Similar to what happened in the transistor world, there's limits to what can be done, and processing power isn't going to get smaller/cheaper/more efficient unless a completely new technology is developed. Moore's law is dead. |
Not everything said is true, like that interesting thing that happened at band camp, or that time I went fishing...
Regarding moon power, quickly! Before it gets away! Often the simplest explanation is that someone is lying. https://i.imgur.com/L4yA6Ex.png |
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I will not care until these are actually in the stores.
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I don't actually worry about battery capacity. Everyone focuses on Tesla-like power density, but buildings don't need to have batteries so small and lightweight that they can transport themselves.
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No, but all of the math that I have seen says that batteries will never pay for themselves.
I guess that I need numbers for non-Tesla-style batteries. :) |
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