Hillhater said:
Repeat ..Repeat,.. Again..
Majority of the developed world lives in cities, with a high proportion in apartment blocks....with the majority of those renting, not owned.
There is no way in hell you can get enough solar (or wind) generated either for individual residences, or even on a suburb scale for city dwellers....even if they did own the residence and felt it worthwhile to invest more capital into the building...and forget any city outside the "sun belt" !
Home solar is fine for those in a fortunate situation to use it, but it cannot work for the majority of the developed world population.
Centralised generation and grid distribution is essential for urban areas.
I recently visited NYork,..and rode (twice) on the elevated train from JFK to Queens. That is several miles of elevated track with a great view over the roofs of heavily populated suburbs of neat detached houses. Out of interest i tried counting the number of houses with Solar on the roofs expecting to estimate rough % od solar equiped properties.
It was easy ! The first trip i counted ONE ! ,...on the return trip i rechecked and saw one more !
There must be 5-10,000 houses visible during that 20 min trip, and even if i missed several others, it demonstrated to me that the uptake of rooftop solar, even by those that have the space and wealth, is very small.
Agreed, was just looking at a win of a by-election seat in Melbourne and its a inner-city area that went for the first time to The Greens party.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-18/greens-win-northcote-by-election/9164644
For those who don't know the Greens Party Australia, they are ultra pro-renewables and ultra intolerant of people with different views (for example they tried to ban Milo from entering Australia https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/ )
When looking at Northcote property prices, the old shacks are all about $1million dollars and a decent old house is around $2.7million.
https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-northcote-126520174
https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-northcote-126291006
But if you look at the roofs on googlemaps satellite view its about 2 in 40 houses have solar panel, and a lot of them are little whimpy token sized ones that won't do much. I can't believe with all the subsidies schemes the government has provided over the years that such a lot about of solar has been taken up in these areas. I assume they don't know of any of the negative sides about solar.
It really seems to be the thing of those who are the most wealthy and live the deepest in the concreted areas of the city, and that is to be fake environmentalists where they ultimately vote on the taxes of the poor via carbon taxes etc by these Greens politicians to pay for dodgy green schemes elsewhere instead of spending the money themselves on their own houses with solar etc.
South Australia's (SA) big Tesla battery has gone online, the article says its going to store the wind farm generation to make it more useful.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/south-australias-big-tesla-battery-fires-up-for-summer/news-story/22a1c061863bfade582acb6f89ebbe0e
The lithium-ion battery system is designed to store excess power generated from wind energy for later use.
It is designed to supply 129 megawatt hours (MWh) of power at times of acute shortage.
I was really surprised when Tesla officially released their Tesla truck with all the specs in range etc but gave no number in the battery size, obviously it's over 1MWh.
So the way to look at SAs "Worlds biggest battery" is to look at something that can only store the energy for 100 eTrucks of the future.
It could be Elon doesn't want to make it clear for people who don't look at basic numbers that SA's battery project is comparatively pointless meaningless gesture, and really SA is just building for the past and not really being green at all.
Like Zehner said these are just monuments to clean energy than actually being actually clean https://youtu.be/v6uVnyjTb58?t=25m55s
I been thinking about where I have been failing to convince people on my points of view and that's being to fair comparing numbers, I normally use small coal power-stations when comparing it to solar so I came up with this as I think its more in line with the methods used by pro-renewables and that is to compare with a larger power-station
Topaz Solar Farm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm ) in the desert of the USA. 25km2 sized. 2016 generation: 1,265,805MWh (great year 2016, 2017 looks to be a lot lower)
Average power 144MW = (1,265,805MWhours / 8760_hours_in_a_year)
Average coal or nuclear power station: average output 3927MW = (34,402,000MWh / 8760)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paluel_Nuclear_Power_Plant
3927MW / 144MW = 27 times more power.
25km2 x 27 =
675km2 of land covered in solar panels to generate the same average power (if you have a super huge battery as well, that will require a lot of land and a lot of energy to dispose of once used)
No real environmentalist who is worth a damn wants to cover that much land to replace a single power-station like this environmentalist is saying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8L9EAWF3E
The other thing that's interesting to note is so many power-stations are surrounded by trees and nature like the Paluel Nuclear Power station https://goo.gl/maps/zRUMTvWEgUD2
Even the roadside is full of lovely green trees https://goo.gl/maps/uqBqFK8GHPk
All the latest studies show co2 sequestration via tree planting is far more helpful to the environment than solar energy generation.
The Paluel Nuclear power station uses less than 1km2 of land that isn't covered in trees using the googlemaps measuring tool including its car par while at the same time providing safe habitat for bird wildlife etc.
The economics of South Australia continues to go down the hill to the point where people frequently say due to so many moving out of the state "the last one out please remember to switch the lights off".
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/david-penberthy-with-south-australia-teetering-on-the-edge-of-an-economic-abyss-the-state-government-must-take-bold-action/news-story/56e3dfcaf9bce0b387b7db5ac118d2f0
Ironically power went out in the area where the big Tesla battery just went up, like Germany so much money is spent on managing renewable energy that there isn't enough to do basic maintenance to keep things up and running or returning service in an adequate time.
Wild weather in South Australia has brought down power lines and triggered blackouts in the communities around the state’s Tesla battery on the day it was switched on.
Data from SA Power Networks has revealed 208 homes in areas around the battery will be without power until as late as 11pm tonight after wild weather and more than 250,000 lightning strikes overnight felled power lines and cut supply.
Parts of Jamestown, where the Tesla battery is located, and around a dozen surrounding communities including Hornsdale, Caltowie, Canowie Belt are without power, with the network operator putting the outages down to storm activity and equipment breakages.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/south-australia-storms-power-blackouts-as-tesla-battery-is-turned-on/news-story/de20d9518b40191381e9534eca722980
People still don't understand that the main gas they are so desperately trying to suppress is incredibly natural and it's crazy they would rather replace it with toxic gases like SF6 or NF3 via green-energy-tech manufacturing.
When we exhale air we are breathing out a massive 40,000 ppm in co2 as our lungs take the oxygen and emit huge amounts of co2.
This is why in confined spaces like a car you can reach 4,000ppm co2