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How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants

How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks. The alternative is to have many smaller plants dispersed, which results in a big loss of efficiency. I'm all for clean energy, but you seem to be handwaving away pretty huge issues as "thought exercise". Our inability to store energy is not just some side concern that will go away any time now. There is a reason carbon fuels are so prevalent - their energy density is far above what we can store in batteries. Without scalable and high density energy storage, unpredictable energy sources like solar or wind are much less useful because often there is no sun or wind at high demand and on the contrary there can be an overproduction during low demand. Germany already causes serious headaches for the European grid when it floods the network with electricity on sunny/windy days. They actually have to pay other countries to take over the extra capacity. Solar, wind, tidal etc... energy are all awesome and clean (if we disregard the land that they take up), but there are many difficult issues that remain to be solved before they can become a core part of the energy production.

Robotbeat 10y ago
High latitudes (above 50 degrees) have a big problem with solar power. Luckily, almost the only people who live that far from the equator are Northern Europeans, who tend to have access to hydro and nuclear. (this is why it's so stupid for Germany to shut down their nuclear power... they're replacing it with coal, brown coal, and gas!) The vast, VAST majority of the world's population lives FAR closer to the equator. Again, you seem to have ignored the part of my post where I mentioned installing enough solar to produce power even during cloudy days. Cost of utility solar is super cheap now. If it continues reducing in cost, it'll be plenty cheap enough to just install 3-5x as many panels as you need to provide power during cloudy days. Yes, solar CAN get cheap enough for that to be a good idea.
- short_sells_poo 10y ago
  I haven't ignored the part where you mentioned overprovisioning. Where do you propose to put the excess power during sunny days? Stable baseline sources like nuclear cannot just be shut down or spun up on a moment's notice to accomodate a vast number of solar energy entering or leaving the grid. At the same time, we don't have a capability to store electricity at sufficient scale so we do need the stable baseline to cover a high enough percentage of our production. The fact of the matter is, as long as we don't have a scalable storage solution, power sources where we can't regulate the power output cannot take up base load and can at best be a small overlay that can pick up load if the beneficial weather happens to coincide with higher load requirements.
  - Robotbeat 10y ago
    This really is not a big technical problem. You simply don't output the power. This is trivial with any kind of decent power-optimizing inverter setup commonly available today. Solar PV isn't spinning a turbine that needs to find a load. If you disconnect a solar panel, it doesn't damage itself, it just sits there. But I'm sure we'd eventually find uses for this extra energy. Like producing ammonia for agriculture.
    - opo 10y ago
      No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need... (Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)
      - Retric 10y ago
        The term Baseload power is not a goal, it's a Problem with some types of power not being flexible. In that context, soar is closer to Baseload power than peaking power plants. Yes, it currently better matches demand than Baseload power, but as you ramp it up the supply / demand miss mach will simply shift around the day. Turning on some peaking power plants at night vs the day is not a significant issue. Further, the solution is excess capacity not long term storage.
fao_ 10y ago
> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks. I mean, most of the same security risks appear in oil pipelines and extraction.
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  And the vast area is still very small compared to agriculture. And it can be done in chunks. The electrical grid is concentrated by its very nature, but we still manage just fine. (Solar is also one of the few truly distributed power sources, but I expect most power in the future will come from vast solar farms due to the ease of automation.)
- short_sells_poo 10y ago
  True, and this is a issue today as well. Which is why I think that proposing a solution that compounds this issue even further should not be taken lightly. Edit: put differently, why should we adopt a new solution that is even more exposed to the already known risks?
  - Robotbeat 10y ago
    A large solar field makes for a pretty diffuse target. You might be able to target the connection to the grid, but that's no worse than it is today (and would be easily repaired). And I don't think our current electrical grid has a major problem that even a slight attention to infrastructure couldn't fix.
    - short_sells_poo 10y ago
      Ok so you are saying that the new solution isn't any worse in terms of security than the current one, so it's fine? In any case, you cannot compare this to oil pipelines directly because we can stockpile oil. Even if all the pipelines are taken out, many countries stockpile oil that can bridge them over until an alternative solution is found. If a considerable part of the electricity comes from some remote site in a desert and the connection is taken out, that'll immediately plunge the country into darkness. I like your optimism about all the problems being trivial, but with your mindset every problem we currently face is trivial. At this point, why don't you just propose that we go and harvest Helium-3 from Jupiter? I mean, we already sent some probes that far, it's just some engineering issues, right? There are a whole host of political, engineering and social issues that need to be sorted before something like you propose can be done. It can work for individual countries in certain regions, but it is not in a state where it can fix the energy problems of the world or liberate us of the carbon dependence.
labcomputer 10y ago
> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks This sentence seems to be at odds with itself. How does needing a large area concentrate security risks? If anything it seems to disperse them. Unlike a coal or nuclear plant, you can't just walk up to a critical part of a solar farm and blow it up. Any part that you damage is relatively isolated from the parts you don't damage. Thus, it takes considerably more effort to take the entire plant offline.
- short_sells_poo 10y ago
  Sorry I worded that sentence poorly. Let's assume two scenarios: a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness. b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
    - tonyarkles 10y ago
      I'm not 100% positive that this is the right video, but I think it is. As part of the "overthrow a nation" plan, he talks specifically about destroying critical infrastructure, like electricity. The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen! edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.
theptip 10y ago
> How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? High voltage DC transmission works fine for this problem. All of the engineering challenges have been credibly worked out and priced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec). The main problems with this approach are political, in that it requires massive cooperation between many countries over very long time scales (decades). Why is there a security risk with putting solar in the desert? It seems like a relatively easy to secure location, and solar cells are hardly high value-density targets for theft or vandalism.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  So you think northern African nations are going to let European nations station troops there and take over a big chunk of their land? That doesn't seem realistic, and seems rather imperialistic actually. Letting the northern African nations provide the security is just plain folly, and also makes Europe completely dependent on these economically backwards and frequently hostile nations.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    Why wouldn't an African nation want to charge rent to some European country for vast amounts of land that are otherwise literally worthless[1]? It's not like they're strangers to private company security forces that are basically just extrajudicial mercenaries. History says any company that wants to do this just needs to apply some bribes to the appropriate officials. [1] In the sense that nobody is willing to buy it so it has no price.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm sure it'll look just great that Germany or whoever is stationing the Wehrmacht in northern Africa, and no one will complain about that... /s You really think that's a viable way to maintain the electric power supply for all of Europe? "What could possibly go wrong?!"
      - 10y ago
Retric 10y ago
Finland net imports of electricity in 2009 were 15%, so about the same as it is today. They have a lot of hydro power and little reason to stop using it. Countries are ok with risking 15% of their generation from external sources because you can get by on 85% supply with minimal disruptions and you can ramp up supply in the short term. Solar in the Sahara is an example, but countries already spend a few percent of GDP on safety, being less efficient but more independent is generally an excepted trade-off. Further, Sahara solar > desalination > farming is probably a better use of that space vs transmitting it.
robotresearcher 10y ago
> How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? You don't. No one said it has to be all solar everywhere. > there are many difficult issues that remain to be solved before they can become a core part of the energy production. Wind and solar are already core sources in some places. In many places, a decent solution to the night-time solar problem is natural gas power stations. We built them already. Finland will use Finland-appropriate solutions. That has very little to do with the appropriateness of solar in Mumbai or Phoenix.
- rtx 10y ago
  Are even thinking about pollution from storage technologies.
cucucfudud 10y ago
i read an article that the nordics actually gets as much sun as southern europe, if you count the whole year. Its as good a place for solar as anywhere else. The summers are sunny all day and night. The problem becomes how to store the energy until the dark winter months. (There are solar panels that doesnt need heat just light) Edit: http://www.nordicenergy.org/article/solar-power-at-the-arctic-circle/ http://www.nordicenergy.org/article/solar-power-at-the-arcti...
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  The seasonal variation of solar power is a big problem if you want to rely mostly on solar power, though. Seasonal storage is insanely expensive with any of the usual methods. I mean, let's say to get daily storage, you need 8 hours of batteries. To get 4 or 5 weeks of storage, you need more like 800 hours of batteries. It's literally 100x the cost. So yeah, if you want to run on natural gas for half the year, then solar in the nordics isn't bad. But luckily the nordics have lots of hydro and don't need any gas or even solar. But on the equator, the seasonal variation is small. The Global South will have a big energy cost advantage as solar costs keep dropping.
bduerst 10y ago
>How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? Microwaves http://www.economist.com/node/18864324 http://www.economist.com/node/18864324
patsplat 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel
MR4D 10y ago
I'm not the OP, but here's a few thoughts... Highly distributed rotating masses would handle a large part of the storage, turning it into more of a power smoothing problem. Secondly, I presume that at some point we'll be covering every building (rooftop and window) with some sort of solar film that converts electricity. Why don't we have those today in large scale production? Probably for the same reason that the US builds more roads instead of mass transit - it's a bias to build what we've alway built, not a real technological limitation.
- ianai 10y ago
  There's definitely a link between where it's economical to place a panel and panel efficiency. As the technology matures it will make sense to place it more places. I think at some point, ultimately, it will be in the paint of cars/buildings.
  - MR4D 10y ago
    Exactly. Just like Moore's law drove the price of computing power to put it practically everywhere, there is a cost curve for solar that will do the same.
petre 10y ago
Solar PV is great distributed power source to install on roofs and maybe that's it. You can combine it with partial storage for household consumption, but even that is a burden.

Robotbeat 10y ago

High latitudes (above 50 degrees) have a big problem with solar power. Luckily, almost the only people who live that far from the equator are Northern Europeans, who tend to have access to hydro and nuclear. (this is why it's so stupid for Germany to shut down their nuclear power... they're replacing it with coal, brown coal, and gas!) The vast, VAST majority of the world's population lives FAR closer to the equator. Again, you seem to have ignored the part of my post where I mentioned installing enough solar to produce power even during cloudy days. Cost of utility solar is super cheap now. If it continues reducing in cost, it'll be plenty cheap enough to just install 3-5x as many panels as you need to provide power during cloudy days. Yes, solar CAN get cheap enough for that to be a good idea.

short_sells_poo 10y ago
I haven't ignored the part where you mentioned overprovisioning. Where do you propose to put the excess power during sunny days? Stable baseline sources like nuclear cannot just be shut down or spun up on a moment's notice to accomodate a vast number of solar energy entering or leaving the grid. At the same time, we don't have a capability to store electricity at sufficient scale so we do need the stable baseline to cover a high enough percentage of our production. The fact of the matter is, as long as we don't have a scalable storage solution, power sources where we can't regulate the power output cannot take up base load and can at best be a small overlay that can pick up load if the beneficial weather happens to coincide with higher load requirements.
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  This really is not a big technical problem. You simply don't output the power. This is trivial with any kind of decent power-optimizing inverter setup commonly available today. Solar PV isn't spinning a turbine that needs to find a load. If you disconnect a solar panel, it doesn't damage itself, it just sits there. But I'm sure we'd eventually find uses for this extra energy. Like producing ammonia for agriculture.
  - opo 10y ago
    No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need... (Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)
    - Retric 10y ago
      The term Baseload power is not a goal, it's a Problem with some types of power not being flexible. In that context, soar is closer to Baseload power than peaking power plants. Yes, it currently better matches demand than Baseload power, but as you ramp it up the supply / demand miss mach will simply shift around the day. Turning on some peaking power plants at night vs the day is not a significant issue. Further, the solution is excess capacity not long term storage.

fao_ 10y ago

> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks. I mean, most of the same security risks appear in oil pipelines and extraction.

Robotbeat 10y ago
And the vast area is still very small compared to agriculture. And it can be done in chunks. The electrical grid is concentrated by its very nature, but we still manage just fine. (Solar is also one of the few truly distributed power sources, but I expect most power in the future will come from vast solar farms due to the ease of automation.)
short_sells_poo 10y ago
True, and this is a issue today as well. Which is why I think that proposing a solution that compounds this issue even further should not be taken lightly. Edit: put differently, why should we adopt a new solution that is even more exposed to the already known risks?
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  A large solar field makes for a pretty diffuse target. You might be able to target the connection to the grid, but that's no worse than it is today (and would be easily repaired). And I don't think our current electrical grid has a major problem that even a slight attention to infrastructure couldn't fix.
  - short_sells_poo 10y ago
    Ok so you are saying that the new solution isn't any worse in terms of security than the current one, so it's fine? In any case, you cannot compare this to oil pipelines directly because we can stockpile oil. Even if all the pipelines are taken out, many countries stockpile oil that can bridge them over until an alternative solution is found. If a considerable part of the electricity comes from some remote site in a desert and the connection is taken out, that'll immediately plunge the country into darkness. I like your optimism about all the problems being trivial, but with your mindset every problem we currently face is trivial. At this point, why don't you just propose that we go and harvest Helium-3 from Jupiter? I mean, we already sent some probes that far, it's just some engineering issues, right? There are a whole host of political, engineering and social issues that need to be sorted before something like you propose can be done. It can work for individual countries in certain regions, but it is not in a state where it can fix the energy problems of the world or liberate us of the carbon dependence.

labcomputer 10y ago

> Furthermore, you need to plaster a vast area in the desert with solar plants, which brings along all sorts of concentrated security risks This sentence seems to be at odds with itself. How does needing a large area concentrate security risks? If anything it seems to disperse them. Unlike a coal or nuclear plant, you can't just walk up to a critical part of a solar farm and blow it up. Any part that you damage is relatively isolated from the parts you don't damage. Thus, it takes considerably more effort to take the entire plant offline.

short_sells_poo 10y ago
Sorry I worded that sentence poorly. Let's assume two scenarios: a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness. b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  I'm surprised to see this kind of simplistic reductionist thinking on HN. "Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors. In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
  - tonyarkles 10y ago
    I'm not 100% positive that this is the right video, but I think it is. As part of the "overthrow a nation" plan, he talks specifically about destroying critical infrastructure, like electricity. The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen! edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.

theptip 10y ago

> How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? High voltage DC transmission works fine for this problem. All of the engineering challenges have been credibly worked out and priced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec). The main problems with this approach are political, in that it requires massive cooperation between many countries over very long time scales (decades). Why is there a security risk with putting solar in the desert? It seems like a relatively easy to secure location, and solar cells are hardly high value-density targets for theft or vandalism.

Arizhel 10y ago
So you think northern African nations are going to let European nations station troops there and take over a big chunk of their land? That doesn't seem realistic, and seems rather imperialistic actually. Letting the northern African nations provide the security is just plain folly, and also makes Europe completely dependent on these economically backwards and frequently hostile nations.
- jandrese 10y ago
  Why wouldn't an African nation want to charge rent to some European country for vast amounts of land that are otherwise literally worthless[1]? It's not like they're strangers to private company security forces that are basically just extrajudicial mercenaries. History says any company that wants to do this just needs to apply some bribes to the appropriate officials. [1] In the sense that nobody is willing to buy it so it has no price.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure it'll look just great that Germany or whoever is stationing the Wehrmacht in northern Africa, and no one will complain about that... /s You really think that's a viable way to maintain the electric power supply for all of Europe? "What could possibly go wrong?!"
    - 10y ago

Retric 10y ago

Finland net imports of electricity in 2009 were 15%, so about the same as it is today. They have a lot of hydro power and little reason to stop using it. Countries are ok with risking 15% of their generation from external sources because you can get by on 85% supply with minimal disruptions and you can ramp up supply in the short term. Solar in the Sahara is an example, but countries already spend a few percent of GDP on safety, being less efficient but more independent is generally an excepted trade-off. Further, Sahara solar > desalination > farming is probably a better use of that space vs transmitting it.

robotresearcher 10y ago

> How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? You don't. No one said it has to be all solar everywhere. > there are many difficult issues that remain to be solved before they can become a core part of the energy production. Wind and solar are already core sources in some places. In many places, a decent solution to the night-time solar problem is natural gas power stations. We built them already. Finland will use Finland-appropriate solutions. That has very little to do with the appropriateness of solar in Mumbai or Phoenix.

rtx 10y ago
Are even thinking about pollution from storage technologies.

cucucfudud 10y ago

i read an article that the nordics actually gets as much sun as southern europe, if you count the whole year. Its as good a place for solar as anywhere else. The summers are sunny all day and night. The problem becomes how to store the energy until the dark winter months. (There are solar panels that doesnt need heat just light) Edit: http://www.nordicenergy.org/article/solar-power-at-the-arctic-circle/ http://www.nordicenergy.org/article/solar-power-at-the-arcti...

Robotbeat 10y ago
The seasonal variation of solar power is a big problem if you want to rely mostly on solar power, though. Seasonal storage is insanely expensive with any of the usual methods. I mean, let's say to get daily storage, you need 8 hours of batteries. To get 4 or 5 weeks of storage, you need more like 800 hours of batteries. It's literally 100x the cost. So yeah, if you want to run on natural gas for half the year, then solar in the nordics isn't bad. But luckily the nordics have lots of hydro and don't need any gas or even solar. But on the equator, the seasonal variation is small. The Global South will have a big energy cost advantage as solar costs keep dropping.

bduerst 10y ago

>How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland? Microwaves http://www.economist.com/node/18864324 http://www.economist.com/node/18864324

patsplat 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel

MR4D 10y ago

I'm not the OP, but here's a few thoughts... Highly distributed rotating masses would handle a large part of the storage, turning it into more of a power smoothing problem. Secondly, I presume that at some point we'll be covering every building (rooftop and window) with some sort of solar film that converts electricity. Why don't we have those today in large scale production? Probably for the same reason that the US builds more roads instead of mass transit - it's a bias to build what we've alway built, not a real technological limitation.

ianai 10y ago
There's definitely a link between where it's economical to place a panel and panel efficiency. As the technology matures it will make sense to place it more places. I think at some point, ultimately, it will be in the paint of cars/buildings.
- MR4D 10y ago
  Exactly. Just like Moore's law drove the price of computing power to put it practically everywhere, there is a cost curve for solar that will do the same.

petre 10y ago

Solar PV is great distributed power source to install on roofs and maybe that's it. You can combine it with partial storage for household consumption, but even that is a burden.