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-   -   What Would It Take To Go 100% Solar? (https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/what-would-take-go-100-solar-37671.html)

Xist 07-17-2019 04:32 PM

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:
  1. We would need to run electrical cables from New Mexico to New England?!
  2. Batteries are still cost-prohibitive.

What else?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czL0ZSscbsM

oil pan 4 07-17-2019 05:27 PM

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.

Grant-53 07-17-2019 06:10 PM

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.

freebeard 07-18-2019 12:33 PM

Quote:

What else?
Reduce demand.

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.

jamesqf 07-21-2019 04:41 PM

The obvious problem is that you need some way to store the electricity at night, or during cloudy periods.

oil pan 4 07-21-2019 06:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamesqf (Post 602512)
The obvious problem is that you need some way to store the electricity at night, or during cloudy periods.

The main design flaw.
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.

Xist 07-21-2019 07:00 PM

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.

freebeard 07-21-2019 07:44 PM

Quote:

The main design flaw.
I'd call it a constraint rather than a flaw.

oil pan 4 07-21-2019 08:26 PM

Then the plan to get all electrical power from them is flawed.

freebeard 07-21-2019 11:20 PM

Quote:

Then the plan to get all electrical power from them is flawed.
I've no doubt the plan is flawed.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Grant-53
New York State just passed a bill to make it carbon free or some such thing by 2050. .... 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.

I simply believe that the design constraint of converting and deconverting power to some form of storage is not it.

Politics is downstream from culture. The solution will come from science and engineering rather than political fiat.

oil pan 4 07-21-2019 11:34 PM

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/

Xist 07-22-2019 11:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by oil pan 4 (Post 602544)
The politicians appear to be more of a problem than a solution.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

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.

NeilBlanchard 07-22-2019 11:07 AM

We need to go to a MIX of renewable energy sources at least 3, plus storage is what makes sense.

Xist 07-22-2019 11:08 AM

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? :)

NeilBlanchard 07-22-2019 11:21 AM

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.

Xist 07-22-2019 11:32 AM

The sewage itself can create electricity. Do you think you could combine the technologies? https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...ell-37647.html

freebeard 07-22-2019 11:47 AM

Moon Power!

redpoint5 07-22-2019 01:41 PM

Yeah, I keep thinking moon power is the most consistent, and as an added bonus might help dampen the eb and flow of tides.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xist (Post 602519)
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.

I don't think so. There are small incremental improvements recently, but I don't see there being massive room for improvement unless a totally different chemistry is developed.

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.

Xist 07-22-2019 02:44 PM

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

freebeard 07-22-2019 04:26 PM

Quote:

Not everything said is true... ==>Regarding moon power, quickly! Before it gets away!... <==the simplest explanation is that someone is lying.
I'm not sure what you're on about. Re Permalink #7, if you follow the Climate Consensus thread, find Permalink #6214
Quote:

hardware.slashdot.org/story/.../startup-aims-to-tackle-grid-storage-problem-with-new-porous-silicon-battery

Quote:

New submitter symgym writes:
Recently out of stealth mode is a new battery technology that's printed on silicon wafers (36 million "micro-batteries" machined into 12-inch silicon wafers). It can scale from small devices to large-scale grid storage and promises four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries for half the price. There should also be no issues with fires caused by dendrite formation.....
Hallquist also notes that the new batteries are 100% recyclable. "At the end of the life of this product, you bring the wafers back in, you clean the wafer off, you reclaim the lithium and other materials. And it's essentially brand new. So we're 100 percent recyclable."
"Hallquist says the battery banks that Cross Border Power plans to sell to utility companies as soon as next year will be installed in standard computer server racks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "One shipping container worth of those racks (totaling 40 racks in all) will offer 4 megawatts (MW) of battery storage capacity, she says. Contrast this, she adds, to a comparable set of rack-storage lithium ion batteries which would typically only yield 1 MW in a shipping container."


Xist 07-22-2019 05:05 PM

I will not care until these are actually in the stores.

Fat Charlie 07-22-2019 09:19 PM

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.

Xist 07-22-2019 10:52 PM

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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