Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Punx0r said:
Since you are so sure there is an impending societal collapse (or at least upheaval), I'm curious what action you are taking now to protect yourself? I suspect the answer is "none" because even you don't really think it's going to happen in 10 years.
Personally I think it will - but it will happen slowly enough that we won't notice instant changes.

The world has changed incredibly since I was a kid. We have the "big brother" state predicted in the novel 1984 - but more often than not it's run by for-profit people who watch your every move and sell the information to the highest bidder. We have AIDS and several hemorrhagic fevers. We hit peak oil for light crude - and switched to tight oil. The US was attacked by Islamic terrorists and 3000 people were killed. We have rapid global warming, and square miles of floating plastic trash in our oceans. Here in the US gas is hitting $4 a gallon again.

If you told people all those negatives back in 1970 they would have assumed that today looked like the world of Mad Max. But of course it doesn't - because we're used to what the world has become, and have adapted.

The same will happen in the next 50 years.
 
SolarStar used crystalline panels on trackers with an automated wash system on 13 km2 of prime desert and makes 1.664 TWh per year. Germany's capacity factor of 11% for solar is barely more than 1/3 of what the SolarStar farm averages.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star
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We are blowing through 400 TWh thermal per DAY!
 
billvon said:
sendler2112 said:
We are blowing through 400 TWh thermal per DAY!
That's a huge number! That's almost .02% of what we receive via insolation every day.

It totally does not matter what the total insolation is. It matters what hardware we can build to capture it. And store it to make it useful, Which will never be anywhere near 1/3 of what we are using today.
 
sendler2112 said:
It totally does not matter what the total insolation is.
It matters. It is what's available.
It matters what hardware we can build to capture it.
Yes, that also matters.
And store it to make it useful, Which will never be anywhere near 1/3 of what we are using today.
Any time anyone looks at a nascent technology and says "we will NEVER be able to do that with any such technology!" - they are almost always wrong.

Take tight oil. Do you know how hard it is to get tight oil out of shale? To use it you'd have to go down the pipe, physically pulverize the rocks that contain it, and then somehow get the oil to flow backwards back up the pipe! You will never be able to use it to do even a fraction of what we do with conventional oil reserves.

Except that we are doing it.
 
sendler2112 said:
Yes. cash hoarding/ working overtime. 3 months of dry staples and canned goods on the shelves. Just for practice. 10 gallons of water and fuel in cans. Acclimated myself to use no a/c. No easy way to add self reliant heat to my second story apartment. Although I do have an "acquired abhorrence" to wasting energy and fuel. I have been challenged by my online tribe, as a mental exercise, to practice a day without food once per week, and a day without electricity or electronics. Will sell everything and move to a more temperate climate after my father passes in a few years and learn how to grow my own food. There is time. Mainly learning, thinking, and talking. For now.

I respect anyone who, saves/prepares for the proverbial rainy day, avoids waste and generally lives a low-impact life. However, I think if your predictions were to come to pass, cash would become worthless and a limited store of food/water would just delay the inevitable.

I think it will play out exactly as Bill describes and all we need to do is move with the times and be prepared to make the odd sacrifice or lifestyle change here and there. I personally can't wait until EVs make up the majority of cars on the road and I anticipate zero problems for the electricity supply to power them.

Yes, current energy use patterns would require massive storage. The not-so-distant future will bring affordable massive storage (projecting current technology and past trends makes this a reasonable assumption). This will be combined with the real answer: Don't store it! Change usage patterns to use it when it's available. This is isn't difficult. We developed and changed our energy usage patterns to suit fossil fuels. We run heavy industrial loads at night because we can't throttle our inflexible power stations and have to take the time to travel out of our way to power-up our ICE cars. This inconvenience means most people unnecessarily carry 1-2 week's worth of fuel.
 
billvon said:
your coal plant runs low CF ..why ?.
Maintenance, uneven power demand, cheaper power available during the day, things like that...
AND..because wind & Solar plants are given priority for supply !
IE:- coal plants are used a "backup" , and hence not allowed to run at normal efficiencies.

and i would expect a new plant to be better..hence the 2.0 GW capacity needed for 15TWh annual.
billvon said:
OK. And new solar and wind installations will also be more efficient, so we'd see an increase there as well.
Err, no. Wind and Solar CF (efficiency) is mostly determined by the weather..that is why i used REAL 2017 data from Germany.
For area required ( rather than just your "panel area" ) lets use Californias "Desert Sunlight" solar farm as a basis...16sqr Kms for 550MW (np)....
billvon said:
..Yep. They use old (and less efficient) First Solar CdTe panels rather than modern monocrystalline panels. 10% vs 18% - quite a difference.:shock: So you were off by almost a factor of two! :shock: I guess "so many wrong figures" referred to your post. :)
I was not born yesterday bill, ( i didnt fall for your panel surface area only calc :roll: )... modern poly panels are close to monos for efficiency, but are much better for reliability and lower cost...they are the current default choice for these mad schemes.
But to ease you anguish, lets try another data source....
One of the latest (2017), biggest(1000MWnp) ,Solar PV farms is Kurnool in india. It is 24sqr kms.
By that design , and using Germanys current solar CF of 0.1..(38TWh from 40 GWnp)..then for that 15TWh annual output, Germany will need 16 plants of that size..= 16 x 24 = 384 sqrkms
That is much better isnt it ?.? :roll:
You are going to need a lot a very tall trees to hide that set up !
And remember , all that is only the equivalent capacity to ONE average coal /gas fueled plant.
 
New Martenson essay.
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Here's just a small smattering of the threats we've created for ourselves:

$247 trillion of global debt, growing exponentially
Off-budget liabilities well over a quadrillion dollars globally ($220+ trillion in the US alone)
Massively underfunded pensions mathematically unable to meet their future obligations
A coming peak in world oil supply somewhere between 2020-2030 (and around 2022 for the US)
A global economy that requires perpetual growth, but can't grow for much longer due to planetary resource constraints
Huge demographic imbalances in Japan, the US, the EU and Russia that will leave too few workers supporting too many elderly
Collapsing ecosystems and increasing heatwaves on both land and sea, threatening crop failures and food chain disruptions.
Collectively these all point to a future of less. Perhaps even a future of nothing.
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https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114209/america-insolvent
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sendler2112 said:
SolarStar used crystalline panels on trackers with an automated wash system on 13 km2 of prime desert and makes 1.664 TWh per year. Germany's capacity factor of 11% for solar is barely more than 1/3 of what the SolarStar farm averages.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star
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We are blowing through 400 TWh thermal per DAY!
Looking at that Wikipedia page I was wondering how they deployed 13km2 of solar panels in 2 years because on average it takes 4 years for a solar farm that size.
What they did is, instead of lumping all the solar panels in the same area (which causes massive build/deployment congestion) they just placed them all over the place, over an area about 60km2.
Solar Star https://goo.gl/maps/vHNtTdYMeCE2
That speeds up deployment a lot.

This goes against the rules of typical large solar deployment, whereby the time the solar farm is built (after 4 years) its lost about 10% of its claimed average capacity, due to solar-panel depletion.
This was pointed out in that book, The Roadmap to Nowhere. http://www.roadmaptonowhere.com/
They estimated millions of square meters per day of solar panels would have to be taken down and replaced in the USA for Solar to be a serious contributor to a 100% USA renewable energy only solution.
Also the old panels would have to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way, or what else is the point. Thats where co2 by-product can look comparatively harmless when you compare these energy products over the long term.

This roughly same sized solar farm took 4 years to build. Dubiously, like the other solar farm mentioned above, it hasn't provided MWh generation numbers in 2 years, as they obviously aren't good.
But in terms of a compact solar farm and trying to make solar look as good as possible I think this project is as good as it gets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm
https://goo.gl/maps/WtazbXrWgcR2

Topaz Solar farm is still my preferred real-world example of a solar farm for many reasons. One of those reasons is they continue to publish their MWh data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
2015: (solar farm fully completed year-long generation) 1,301,337MWh
2017: 1,237,532
Each year they have decreased their average output, thats 4.9% total decrease over 3 years of fully completed operation.
So I expect about 8% total decrease in average capacity in 5 years time. If you could include the panel depletion during the build it probably evens out to a nice 10% loss in average generating capacity ability.

I have looked at the largest solar farms I could find that have continued to publish their data and seem trustworthy and this is a common trend.

Point is, by comparison, if you lost 8-10% of the promised capacity of a coal/gas/nuclear power-station after 5 years, it would probably be considered fraud against the taxpayer.

The true story behind wind/solar renewables is that all the tiny swiss hole problems are too many for most people to weigh up, these renewables have naturally built in Chewbacca defense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clKi92j6eLE
Peoples head explode before they are able to weigh it all up, the only thing that's very clear is the end price.

South Australia, for example, had $8,823MWh the other week. That's a pretty easily absorbable fact. Remember SA have 1810MW installed capacity in wind, practically enough to run SA, if the wind could run at its claimed 100% capacity, as SA use on Average 1500MW.
So SA has technically 100% renewables installed. If only the actual "real-world generation" on average wasn't a fraction of the claimed "installed capacity".
 
Some of the output variability must be weather and maintenance issues. Desert Sunlight farm has actually posted increases every year 2014-16. up to 28% CF. Too bad none of these big farms in Cali posted output for 2017.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm
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So it looks like the best, real world solar PV values will be about .1 TWh/ year/ km2. Equitorial locations somewhat higher.
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$1.46 Billion for this project was about $3/ W of nameplate. $10/ W actual output.
 
sendler2112 said:
Some of the output variability must be weather and maintenance issues. Desert Sunlight farm has actually posted increases every year 2014-16. up to 28% CF. Too bad none of these big farms in Cali posted output for 2017.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm
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So it looks like the best, real world solar PV values will be about .1 TWh/ year/ km2. Equitorial locations somewhat higher.
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$1.46 Billion for this project was about $3/ W of nameplate. $10/ W actual output.
Look more carefully.
For the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, Wikipedia quote: "Commission date 2015"

This means the ONLY YEAR it was in full production was 2016, and that is conveniently the only FULL year it is willing to display, no 2017 data, none at all, same with almost all these large solar projects, EXCEPT Topaz.
ALL those previous years of shown MWh generated were years the solar panels hadn't been finished being deployed yet, so naturally, every year while still being built it will have more MWh produced because its not finished yet.

Once its all done and built, and its in a solid desert area with consistent sun then the MWh will trend down by around 1.65% each year as the capacity depletes. 1.65% per year doesn't sound like much but its 8.25% over 5 years..
Sure, in theory even a desert location the clouds should cause different production in solar generation each year on average. But so far the 25km2 sized deployment area of Topaz and its completion date in 2014 says otherwise. Until the entire 2018 year is published, we got nothing else to work with.
But of course, you're right there has to be some more cloudy years than others.
A full 2 decades worth of full-year generation from this project will be the most ideal. Would be interesting to know how many inverters get changed and how much generation maintenance costs are after 10 years of operation.

I am actually really keen to see all the years continue on these huge solar farms so we can see can calculate the depletion statistics but so far Topaz Solar farm is the only one that updates once per year or so.

*Add/Edit*
I keep coming by these interesting facts from this PDF, but keep forgetting the source so here it is.
Title: THE FOOTPRINT OF ENERGY: LAND USE OF U.S. ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION
https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
 
Hillhater said:
I was not born yesterday bill, ( i didnt fall for your panel surface area only calc :roll: )... modern poly panels are close to monos for efficiency, but are much better for reliability and lower cost...they are the current default choice for these mad schemes.
CdTe panels are not the same as polycrystalline panels. CdTe are not made of silicon.

Perhaps you were born yesterday after all . . . .
 
New Heinberg essay.
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https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
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"Optimism is essential; it draws us toward the best possible futures. But when it turns into wishful thinking, it can blind us to the consequences of our present actions. In the worst potential case, the results could be collectively suicidal."
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https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/richard-heinberg/
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sendler2112 said:
New Heinberg essay.
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https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
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"Optimism is essential; it draws us toward the best possible futures. But when it turns into wishful thinking, it can blind us to the consequences of our present actions. In the worst potential case, the results could be collectively suicidal."
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https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/richard-heinberg/
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Yeah, mass population/migration is just crazy. I think the governments do it just to keep the big companies happy, more people coming into richer countries means more money spent on buying their products, = higher quarterly profits for their share price.
As CEOs always claim along the lines of, "we wouldn't be doing our fiduciary duty to our shareholders if we didn't do everything in our power possible to keep this going"

When looking at Australia via google maps satellite-view almost every piece of flat green land has been cleared of its trees and is now farmland. The only spots where this isn't the case are hilly/mountain spots where its obviously just too much work.
But this seems to be common just about anywhere in the world. For the western style quality of living we enjoy today there really isn't any more space, the only way to make it "work" is for the poorer to have less and the better lifestyle for the rich.

I think SA/Adelaide is a good example for this (aside from RE) as you can just see every spare inch of land is farmland practically till it hits the desert https://goo.gl/maps/9jKnRcwACH92

One day in the future I can't help but think a steak dinner will be considered something only rich people eat, the thing I wonder is will the "programmed-poor" even notice they are now well below what was considered normal foods for everyone, the evidence suggests a big no.

Melbourne has changed massively over the last 10 years or so, its just chocoblock full of people, and when I ride around in the inner areas of Melbourne I see a lot of miserable frustrated people, lots of cars honking, lots of people yelling at each other for tiny things, I honestly believe the people crush is killing them.

I live next to a park, I used to always walk through a lovely duel row of aligned trees, was my favorite walk.
But since there have been so many new apartments put in the area there have been more people in the park. They placed a public-park toilet right in the middle of the row of the trees, my favorite path. Now I have seen UberEats/Deliveroo people ride up on their bikes at night and just pee on the outside walls of the public toilet, I am not joking.

Now that whole park area smells like a sewer. It's almost like some powerful politician is playing some kind of sick joke on me, 1984 style, trying to ruin the little things I enjoy.

When watching Australian ABC news (which is a similar political spectrum as CNN or BBC) they often talk about the great virtues of mass immigration etc.
These MSM groups abuse their power on what they can inject into peoples minds, they have so many people viciously protesting for open borders, or at least near open-borders policy.
And it's these same people that also then complain about unfair low wages and way overvalued home pricing.

This is MSM abuse of "knowledge power". I am calling it media "Spectrum Privilege", this is caused when all media is not on the internet via an evenly available source (like all video media being on YouTube via web-browser).

The TV spectrum can be reallocated to 5G mobile now, the sooner the better in my eyes.
While CNN is cable based, it still falls into "Spectrum Privilege" because the cable it travels over can't be used for general internet access, as in the bandwidth/spectrum it uses is locked into delivering CNN only.

With MSM constantly pushing mass immigration, this is where ABC/BBC/CNN are cancers on this world, they don't tell people basic stuff like economic basic "Supply & Demand Law".
I been trying to think up an easily absorbable way to explain it, because explaining this is crucial and key.
Maybe I can get some feedback on this description below.
Watch this video https://youtu.be/GqeRnxSuLFI
Then watch it again but replace "Bananas" with "Houses".
And there's the problem. Folks are programmed to viciously fight for open borders as mainstream-media has been brainwashing them that its fantastic, but they don't understand that its the CORE problem in causing house price over-valuation. People need somewhere to live somewhere, there are NO exceptions to this rule!

And then again, watch a typical news report video on low wages https://youtu.be/Sds8F7ukkJQ
Then watch the economics "Supply & Demand Law" video again and swap "Bananas" with "Jobs". And it's the same problem again, people are fighting for open borders just to ruin their higher wages demand potential!
More available workers = lower demand for any available worker = lower value of the worker = lower wages.
In the rural areas of Australia its been shown that when there are fewer workers available, businesses have been taking on unskilled people and training them for the job while paying them, that's massively different, that's when the "demand law" sits on the other side of the spectrum.

The Australian government is trying to convince people it would be OK to have even a bigger surge in mass migration with the ABS constantly pumping out memes like this on social media Facebook/Twitter
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiWdSDfUcAAW9Q4.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Di1O3ifU4AENqkt.jpg

People are easily programmed/dumb and I think they are being betrayed. My only real hope to fix this problem is all media merging onto the internet only and being equally available via the standard web-browser.
This way people can easily choose wider sources of information rather than the traditional "TV, hit the remote button and be told what to think" method we have today, this model has turned into cancer on peoples quality of living. Getting rid of this old model and forcing people to be internet only will force people to more habitually search and think for themselves, rather than being told what to think via CNN/BBC/ABC.

I have been using this browser model for "TV" my self in the living room. I just have a 65" HTPC with a wireless mouse as my "TV remote", I can't stress enough how much I love this setup. https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2731691#r5

This is what I love about emerging popular alternative media on Youtube, it's more direct, wastes less of peoples time and is more informative. The old establishment media like CNN are constantly trying to get news sources even like PJW banned, there's news on it almost every day.. I think PJW YT channel is banned in some euro countries.
https://youtu.be/Sp_LA2qE4aM
[youtube]Sp_LA2qE4aM[/youtube]
But I am expecting internet-only based "free market content" to get a lot better as the time goes on. MSM via its "Spectrum Privilege" will never try to get better, it will rather just try and entrench themselves and try and block competitors to the very end rather than compete.

I made a meme, it could be considered provocative to minds overly "programmed" but I think its really quite a fair statement.
It's a picture of, migrants traveling across Europe, a picture of UK housing which I understand is almost as expensive as Australian housing, and a picture of the typical leftist CNN/BBC/ABC protestors unknowingly but viciously fighting to lower the living standards of their own lives, by ignoring basics like economic Supply & Demand Law and listening to MSM.

Djv2syJV4AAoCWs.jpg

I would have thought most people have seen this video. But obviously not. And I am constantly surprised how many people haven't seen anything that I would consider common knowledge. This is because of course, MSM will never show videos like this, people still sit there in front of traditional MSM TV expecting to be shown useful information, but they won't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE

[youtube]LPjzfGChGlE[/youtube]

You can see this guy has been talking about this subject for years, here's a similar speech from the same guy from about 20 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t976q6CeN8Q
Obviously with the "Immigration Gumballs" video he has been thinking up new ways to make his point of view as easily absorbable as possible. Yet only a tiny amount of people have seen it. 5million in the scale of things is nothing when people like PewDiePie get that many video views in a day making garbage videos https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/videos

And I must say I am enjoying Lauren Southern visit to Australia.
Her latest video proves she isn't allowed to walk down some public streets in Sydney. Basically, because it would be a breach of Sharia law, which is a non-western culture. Which is suppose to be ABC/MSM's dream of multiculturalism.
https://youtu.be/LqY4Z1fTrMc
[youtube]LqY4Z1fTrMc[/youtube]
 
The obvious problem is too many gumballs keep piling up every year. So world Women's education and family planning is key. Many religions were formed in a time before modern scientific understanding. And over-population. And so their outdated codes may not be the right plan forever.
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But then we are also stuck in a debt based world economy which only pays back the new interest with growth. And social security government entitlements were never fully funded by those that will draw from them. Instead, retirement social plans were designed to be paid by a GROWING number of younger people that are still working and paying in. So negative population growth puts an impossible strain on the fragile world economy.
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The free market is elegant and efficient in many ways. But also has many serious flaws in a global, modern world. Many early philosophers immediately grasped the implications of using a system that places every human in direct competition with every other human which tends to squash any altruistic decisions and leads to the tradgedy of the commons where resources are selfishly sucked up as fast as possible by one person before anyone else gets any. And the markets pay almost nothing for finite expendable resources. Only for the cost of extraction. What are THEY going to do 200 years from now and beyond when high grade resources are all consumed and washed away. There is no planet B.
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The free labor market only functions when there is a low availability of labor to keep the price up. Now that the world is over-populated and is a global market, viscious inequity has set in. Those that have the money to begin with get more and more, the vast majority get less. And free market laborers will only work hard to rise up if there is a prospect of growth. But we need negative growth.
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We will need a whole new way.
 
It's important to know about the relationship of the ER/ EI of liquid fuel and the world economy.
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"The prosperity and stability of modern society is inextricably linked to the production and consumption of energy, especially oil (Odum, 1973, Hall et al., 1986, Hall and Klitgaard, 2012; Tverberg, 2012).

Economic production, exchange and growth requires work and consequently a steady and consistent flow of energy to do that work. Longer intervals of sustained economic growth in countries and the world have been punctuated by numerous oscillations; i.e. there are periods of economic expansion but also recession. In general, the growth of real GDP is highly correlated with rates of oil consumption (Murphy et al., 2011). Four out of the five recessions experienced since 1970 can be explained by examining oil price shocks."
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"Thus society seems to be caught in a dilemma unlike anything experienced in the last few centuries. During that time most problems (such as needs for more agricultural output, worker pay, transport, pensions, schools and social services) were solved by throwing more technology investments and energy at the problem. In many senses this approach worked, for many of these problems were resolved or at least ameliorated, although at each step populations grew so that more potential issues had to be served. In a general sense all of this was possible only because there was an abundance of cheap (i.e. high EROI) high quality energy, mostly oil, gas or electricity. We believe that the future is likely to be very different, for while there remains considerable energy in the ground it is unlikely to be exploitable cheaply, or eventually at all, because of its decreasing EROI. Alternatives such as photovoltaics and wind turbines are unlikely to be nearly as cheap energetically or economically as past oil and gas when backup costs are considered. In addition there are increasing costs everywhere pertaining to potential climate changes and other pollutants. Any transition to solar energies would require massive investments of fossil fuels. Despite many claims to the contrary—from oil and gas advocates on the one hand and solar advocates on the other—we see no easy solution to these issues when EROI is considered. If any resolution to these problems is possible it is probable that it would have to come at least as much from an adjustment of society's aspirations for increased material affluence and an increase in willingness to share as from technology. Unfortunately recent political events do not leave us with great optimism that such changes in societal values will be forthcoming."
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856#bib37
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Two interesting developments:

First is a study that shows that if you raise efficiency from 22% to 32% by using tandem silicon cells (i.e. two silicon cells stacked on top of each other, each with a different doping scheme) and increase the cost by a factor of 3, you are about cost parity for solar installations. This is because the non-panel costs (i.e. racking, wiring, permitting etc) are making up a larger and larger fraction of solar installation costs as solar panel prices drop - and an increase in efficiency gives you more power without changing any of those costs - which improves your cost per watt. So if panel costs rise by a factor of 3 (from 60 cents a watt to 1.80 a watt) and inverter costs increase by 45% (to deal with the greater power available) you are back at the same pricing per watt for the final install.

Why is this important? Because there are a lot of installations that aren't practical because of limited size - the installer can't get enough power in the small area of roof, or land, or roadway, or parking lot, to cover the demand. This increases the available power per square meter by almost 50%.

This makes panel fabrication more expensive, since you have to add a step, use more silicon and change the electrode arrangement. But it will not be likely to be three times more expensive - which means the final panel may well enable cheaper solar installations (per watt.)

A second, somewhat related development is the use of silicon perskovites. These are a different way of making silicon PV cells, one that uses a wet process (i.e. chemical based) rather than the usual high temperature vacuum doping process, so it should be a lot cheaper. Perskovites can also be "painted" on top of a regular silicon cell to get the tandem cells described above. So far Swiss scientists working for Neuchâtel have already hit 25% efficiencies with such a scheme - and this should be easy to integrate onto current cells.

The one big remaining problem is compatibility with water. Perskovites are less tolerant of moisture than traditional PV cells, and the EVA encapsulant used currently allows some moisture in.

https://www.powerelectronics.com/alternative-energy/scientists-use-silicon-perovskite-boost-solar-cell-efficiency
 
38264107_1790650647680706_8542643385708576768_o.jpg

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38010025_1790651844347253_5525850230920052736_o.jpg

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If anyone does not think these reserchers are in the ball park can you show us where they went wrong?
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http://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf
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sendler2112 said:
If anyone does not think these reserchers are in the ball park can you show us where they went wrong?
They probably didn’t, in their paradigm.

But, today is 2018, not 2013 (think PV prices evolution for ex.) and it is not Germany everywhere in the world (there are to many far better places in the world for solar for example).
 
parabellum said:
sendler2112 said:
If anyone does not think these reserchers are in the ball park can you show us where they went wrong?
They probably didn’t, in their paradigm.

But, today is 2018, not 2013 (think PV prices evolution for ex.) and it is not Germany everywhere in the world (there are to many far better places in the world for solar for example).

Nuclear, coal, oil, and gas never do a fair accounting for their externalities. They let everybody else pick up the tab and pretend they aren't responsible for those ongoing costs.
 
I should have added: Let's just disregard Nuclear for now since nobody wants that. My concern is the ER/EI of solar PV in Germany performing at 4:1. Other studies have it no higher than 7 worldwide. Without any storage. Which would cut it in half. At this point it would be barely better than nothing for a simplified, Agrarian lifestyle for a much smaller total population.
 
sendler2112 said:
Can we afford storage? This study is interesting also.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2014/ee/c3ee42125b
Link doesn't work.

Right now we can't "afford" storage in that it fully 'off grid' systems are not price-competitive other than in places like Hawaii, where their oil-based electrical grid is already hideously expensive.

But again, storage costs come down while energy prices go up. And dirt-cheap solar energy is going to be a strong economic driver for storage - first for frequency stabilization (allows existing grids to run much closer to their generation limits) then for voltage stabilization (allows more solar/wind to be installed at remote grid locations) then for ramp rate limiting (to allow utilities to keep their peakers off-line until needed) and then for peak load shaving/load shifting. That means there is going to be strong demand for both expensive and cheap storage, and the runway for development of such technologies is therefore long.

We are looking at a future where most of the electrical grid will be based on intermittent renewable sources. That means storage will be part of the solution.
 
sendler2112 said:
At this point it would be barely better than nothing for a simplified, Agrarian lifestyle for a much smaller total population.
If you prefer that lifestyle, then by all means, go for it. However, I have the feeling most people will want cars, air conditioning and ovens - and will be willing to pay for them as they do now.
 
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