5 ms·

Solar Power Blowing Up in the United States

28 points by zshahan 16y ago

ax0n 16y ago
I'm really looking forward to the advances that are being made in solar power. Just a few short years ago, it was still mostly an inefficient pipe dream. We're a long way off from being able to fully charge daily-used commuter vehicles with on-board solar panels (to reduce our dependence on coal and oil burned to charge the current wave of electric vehicles) but grid-connected solar farms are gaining a lot of traction. I like that.
- davidryal 16y ago
  solar's strength will always be in its decentralization, not its efficiency. If we can get the best of both worlds to some extent (e.g. car charging overnight from batteries charged by a rooftop home solar array), that's a going a long way towards 'daily' sustainability.
  - stratomorph 16y ago
    While I agree with you about decentralization, onboard solar cells won't ever do the trick. Even for a home-sized array, I'm not sure it can be made practical. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures: To really replace a gasoline-powered vehicle, an electric car needs a similar amount of energy at its disposal. My car (a 92 Accord) holds about 16 gallons of gas. Figure it's about 50% efficient, and gasoline holds about 45 MJ/kg, and that's about 1 gigajoule of usable energy in a full tank. So to charge my car (without running the house at all) I have to collect and store 1e9 joules during the daylight hours. That's about 12 kW, if it could run 24 hours a day. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells), a solar system can produce about 20% of its peak rating, so I need a system rated for about 60 kW at noon, in order to average 12 kW through the night. Assuming a reasonable conversion efficiency of 20%, that means I need to actually intercept 300 kW of sunlight. Wikipedia uses a figure of 1000 W/m^2 in that article, so I'd need a 300 square meter panel. In units familiar to me, that's pushing 60 feet square. Large for a house, never will fit the car. Such a large system just to charge a car seems impractical to me. We can tweak parameters and dramatically shrink that size, since after all I would hardly ever need to charge the car from an empty battery, but someone who drives a larger vehicle over a longer commute might realistically have such high demand. (We could also argue about the size of the vehicles, but this is America: Suburbans aren't going away in my lifetime.) That said, charging the car overnight would use vastly more energy than my house does on a daily basis. Solarizing the house is getting more practical, especially since the grid's always connected.
    - pasbesoin 16y ago
      Check your conversion: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1040&bih=697&q=square+meter+in+square+feet https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&... 1 square meter = 10.7639104 square feet
      - stratomorph 16y ago
        I stand by the approximation. 300 m^2 is about 17.3m on a side, 17.3 m in feet is a touch under 57 ft. Rounded to one sig fig because I'm not carrying any sort of precision through these estimates. Edit: Or are you talking about the "60 feet square" bit? I don't mean 60 square feet, I mean 60 feet on a side. I suppose I could have picked a clearer idiom.
        pasbesoin 16y ago
        Yes, I meant the latter. I see what you mean, now. Edit: And my bad, for mis-reading "feet square" as "square feet". Sorry!
    - ugh 16y ago
      That’s assuming you need all the energy of a full tank every day, right? If you drive something like 50 miles every day you will need something like 1.5 gallons with a current car which means that you can cut your large solar array in ten pieces. That’s 30 m^2 or 323 square feet.
      - stratomorph 16y ago
        Sure, the assumption that I need a full tank every day is pushing it, but that's partially balanced by the fact that I used a fuel-efficient car for a baseline. Someone who drives 100 miles a day with the electrical equivalent of 15-20 mpg would need significantly more. My point is that a fully-capable vehicle is an aggressive target for solar energy. Our houses use much less, so let's start by aiming there.
        16y ago
  - jnw2 16y ago
    If we manage to get cheap solar and cheap batteries, the usage pattern is probably going to be more like: top off batteries at work during the day, drive home, partially drain car batteries out to grid while the sun doesn't shine overnight, drive to work on what remains in the car batteries. NIMBYism wrt adding new long haul transmission lines is likely to favor solar cells on many roofs if the cost of the solar cells come down enough.
- zshahan 16y ago
  @ax0n: yeah, the grid-connected solar farms and large-scale solar thermal projects are really starting to come in. a ton in the pipeline too.
- jws 16y ago
  You are forever away from fully charging a commuter vehicle with on-board solar panels. given: the daily solar power on a sunny day is about 4 kilowatt hours per square meter. given: you have a big roof and get 2 square meters of solar panels. assume: You can have magical 100% efficient panels instead of the 20-30% you could have. compute: You get 8 kilowatt hours of energy each day. google: That is about 30 megajoules of energy. wikipedia: Gasoline has 35 megajoules per liter. thusly: Your tiny car with a huge roof covered in impossibly efficient solar panels will get you the equivalent of one liter of gasoline a day. § But I have to wonder: Why are you carrying your solar panels around with you? That just wastes energy. Let them sit somewhere and send power to the grid. Pick up the power where you need it, when you need it. The only function for a roof mounted solar panel is to look really cool in concept art.
  - ph0rque 16y ago
    Your analysis is way too conservative. An analysis by Tesla Motors some time ago calculated that if you drive the Roadster an average of 35 miles a day, you need about 105ft^2 of solar panels to produce all the electricity for it, assuming 18%-efficient solar panels. [1] The Tesla Roadster has an area, when viewed from the top, of 72ft^2. [2] That means if you were able to cover it with solar panels that were 27% efficient, you could power it just from the power it produced. As far as your last point, I agree: I'd rather put the solar panels on the garage roof, where I can somewhat control how much sunlight it gathers, than on the car. 1. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/electric-cars-and-photovoltaic-solar-cells http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/electric-cars-and-photovolta... 2. http://www.netcarshow.com/tesla/2008-roadster/ http://www.netcarshow.com/tesla/2008-roadster/
    - jws 16y ago
      Good numbers in the Tesla Roadster wikipedia introduction. wikipedia: The tesla roadster use 490 kiljoules per kilometer. compute: Our 30 megajoules above will take us 38 miles. Of course I'm still using mythical 100% efficient solar cells on a biggish flat roof and all sunny days, and Tesla used mythical shape hugging solar cells on all of their exposed surfaces. I still think the best solution for a solar powered car is to place your solar cells the south western deserts near LA and pull what power you need from the grid. That way you get a lot more power delivered from your cells.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  The future of electric cars involves battery swap stations, not generating the electricity themselves. For example, you go to a gas station, and a fully charged battery is mechanically swapped for your drained battery. Would take 30 seconds and your car is back to full. Then the drained batteries are recharged at the station while you are already off driving around. This obviously could not take place for a while due to issues of standardization. But its more likely the solar panels will be on the gas station or power plant servicing it than on your car.
  - jnw2 16y ago
    I'm not convinced you need battery swap stations for personal vehicles. The Nissan Leaf has a 500 VDC, 125A quick charge connector, which allows 80% charge of its ~23 kWH battery in a half hour. If you have a similar wattage charging option in a car with a 200+ mile range battery, it may turn out that the time that you will spend for lunch/restroom breaks in a typical 500 mile day of driving will be enough to recharge your battery enough, assuming you start the day with the battery topped off, and all of the restaurants and rest stops have charging stations. (But I suspect the restaurants will see early adoption of charging stations as a way to attract customers/advertise their business.) The trucking industry may well benefit from swap stations, though. The Tesla Roadster is something like 1/4 or 1/3 battery by weight. The entire tractor of a typical tractor trailer rig is probably a bit less than 1/4 of the total rig by weight, and the tractor can't be 100% battery. This will probably translate to a somewhat shorter range. On the other hand, at 60 MPH, wind resistance is probably what consumes most of the energy, and that is not strictly proportional to the weight as you scale up from personal automobile to tractor trailer.
    - metamemetics 16y ago
      So 3 factors shape this market: batterycell tech, charging station tech, vehicle tech. The outcome depends on the rate these 3 develop relative to one another. Perhaps we could graph and predict if we had enough data? Perhaps charging station tech advances the quickest. A business produces commercial chargers and markets them to trendy coffee shops with strip mall parking (that are likely to have "green" customers) or perhaps to non-munincipally owned parking garages in urban areas. And another startup develops and markets commercial chargers for households with garages. Capitalizing on a decentralization trend (computers in every home) has great business potential. But the venture risk might be too high due and corresponding probability of success too low for this particular paradigm to take hold. Battery swapping for trucking has the advantage of being a smaller, easier to target market. But the disadvantage of less electric vehicle tech.
FluidDjango 16y ago
Well, as much as I'd like to believe it... a report from "Solar Energy Industry Association" is not a very independent analysis. And there's the problem with presenting a bar graph showing linear growth over the next few years, followed by a text that says the claim is for "exponential" growth over the next few years.
- humbledrone 16y ago
  The graph does not show growth increasing linearly, as you say. What it shows is that the rate of growth is increasing linearly, which indicates that there is an acceleration in how fast solar power capacity is being created. Thus, the growth of installed power plants will in fact be increasing quadratically. In layman's terms, quadratic growth is often referred to (incorrectly) as "exponential" growth. If the article included a graph of the total solar power capacity over time, it would indeed appear to be increasing "exponentially."
- zshahan 16y ago
  however, they do have more data than just about anyone, so they are better fit to do such analyses
ojbyrne 16y ago
Having just worked at a company that installs solar panels, one thing was obvious - the use of solar panels was driven largely by government incentives, that are steadily being cut back. Perhaps the cost will drop enough over time to make up for the loss of those government incentives, but I don't think that's a sure thing.
bugsy 16y ago
Um, no one sees any problems with that chart? Every single point except the first one for the current year is theoretical and assume projections of increases per year that are more than total current capacity. That's like taking the US GNP and making a projection that we will undergo 150% growth the next two years, then stabilize into linear growth after that at the same rate. Saying that things are "blowing up" currently just ain't so. Where is the 2009 to 2010 curve, and how did they get the starting point in 2010 when the year isn't even over yet. Sorry, but this is clearly an article placed by solar panel salesmen.
- zshahan 16y ago
  if you read through the article, you'll see that solar capacity more than doubled from 2009-2010. it would be nice if it included previous growth, which actually was similar. but this is more about the future based on what is happening now and expected in the future... i'm sure they used the previous years' data though & showing those data in such a graph would be useful as well. however, the site covers that regularly, so I think the regular readers are quite familiar with the info.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    We might want to clarify here that you are a professional writer for the site in question and the author of the given post; also you post a similar comment there in response to a similar question. Also, despite having access to the alleged pre-2010 data in question that you say is well known to regular readers on your site you provide no links to demonstrate where this data might be. By the way, on another topic, you need to check out your site in Safari, there is a fatal javascript loop. Probably a bug in Safari since it doesn't manifest in other browsers but it should still be addressed.
DougWebb 16y ago
The most amazing thing about solar energy is clearly it's ability to enable extrapolating a trend line from a single data point, and an estimated one at that. How efficient!
Helianthus16 16y ago
Hate to say it, but this felt... spammy. They didn't include any trending data from now, they just... kinda drew a line upwards? Yeah, solar power is cool, it's growing and reasonable to assume it will continue doing so. Article's rather light on information, though.
dmfdmf 16y ago
Harvesting the power of government stimulus.
- zshahan 16y ago
  a lot more government money goes into other forms of energy, though

28 points by zshahan 16y ago

ax0n 16y ago

I'm really looking forward to the advances that are being made in solar power. Just a few short years ago, it was still mostly an inefficient pipe dream. We're a long way off from being able to fully charge daily-used commuter vehicles with on-board solar panels (to reduce our dependence on coal and oil burned to charge the current wave of electric vehicles) but grid-connected solar farms are gaining a lot of traction. I like that.

davidryal 16y ago
solar's strength will always be in its decentralization, not its efficiency. If we can get the best of both worlds to some extent (e.g. car charging overnight from batteries charged by a rooftop home solar array), that's a going a long way towards 'daily' sustainability.
- stratomorph 16y ago
  While I agree with you about decentralization, onboard solar cells won't ever do the trick. Even for a home-sized array, I'm not sure it can be made practical. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures: To really replace a gasoline-powered vehicle, an electric car needs a similar amount of energy at its disposal. My car (a 92 Accord) holds about 16 gallons of gas. Figure it's about 50% efficient, and gasoline holds about 45 MJ/kg, and that's about 1 gigajoule of usable energy in a full tank. So to charge my car (without running the house at all) I have to collect and store 1e9 joules during the daylight hours. That's about 12 kW, if it could run 24 hours a day. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells), a solar system can produce about 20% of its peak rating, so I need a system rated for about 60 kW at noon, in order to average 12 kW through the night. Assuming a reasonable conversion efficiency of 20%, that means I need to actually intercept 300 kW of sunlight. Wikipedia uses a figure of 1000 W/m^2 in that article, so I'd need a 300 square meter panel. In units familiar to me, that's pushing 60 feet square. Large for a house, never will fit the car. Such a large system just to charge a car seems impractical to me. We can tweak parameters and dramatically shrink that size, since after all I would hardly ever need to charge the car from an empty battery, but someone who drives a larger vehicle over a longer commute might realistically have such high demand. (We could also argue about the size of the vehicles, but this is America: Suburbans aren't going away in my lifetime.) That said, charging the car overnight would use vastly more energy than my house does on a daily basis. Solarizing the house is getting more practical, especially since the grid's always connected.
  - pasbesoin 16y ago
    Check your conversion: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1040&bih=697&q=square+meter+in+square+feet https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&... 1 square meter = 10.7639104 square feet
    - stratomorph 16y ago
      I stand by the approximation. 300 m^2 is about 17.3m on a side, 17.3 m in feet is a touch under 57 ft. Rounded to one sig fig because I'm not carrying any sort of precision through these estimates. Edit: Or are you talking about the "60 feet square" bit? I don't mean 60 square feet, I mean 60 feet on a side. I suppose I could have picked a clearer idiom.
      - pasbesoin 16y ago
        Yes, I meant the latter. I see what you mean, now. Edit: And my bad, for mis-reading "feet square" as "square feet". Sorry!
  - ugh 16y ago
    That’s assuming you need all the energy of a full tank every day, right? If you drive something like 50 miles every day you will need something like 1.5 gallons with a current car which means that you can cut your large solar array in ten pieces. That’s 30 m^2 or 323 square feet.
    - stratomorph 16y ago
      Sure, the assumption that I need a full tank every day is pushing it, but that's partially balanced by the fact that I used a fuel-efficient car for a baseline. Someone who drives 100 miles a day with the electrical equivalent of 15-20 mpg would need significantly more. My point is that a fully-capable vehicle is an aggressive target for solar energy. Our houses use much less, so let's start by aiming there.
      - 16y ago
- jnw2 16y ago
  If we manage to get cheap solar and cheap batteries, the usage pattern is probably going to be more like: top off batteries at work during the day, drive home, partially drain car batteries out to grid while the sun doesn't shine overnight, drive to work on what remains in the car batteries. NIMBYism wrt adding new long haul transmission lines is likely to favor solar cells on many roofs if the cost of the solar cells come down enough.
zshahan 16y ago
@ax0n: yeah, the grid-connected solar farms and large-scale solar thermal projects are really starting to come in. a ton in the pipeline too.
jws 16y ago
You are forever away from fully charging a commuter vehicle with on-board solar panels. given: the daily solar power on a sunny day is about 4 kilowatt hours per square meter. given: you have a big roof and get 2 square meters of solar panels. assume: You can have magical 100% efficient panels instead of the 20-30% you could have. compute: You get 8 kilowatt hours of energy each day. google: That is about 30 megajoules of energy. wikipedia: Gasoline has 35 megajoules per liter. thusly: Your tiny car with a huge roof covered in impossibly efficient solar panels will get you the equivalent of one liter of gasoline a day. § But I have to wonder: Why are you carrying your solar panels around with you? That just wastes energy. Let them sit somewhere and send power to the grid. Pick up the power where you need it, when you need it. The only function for a roof mounted solar panel is to look really cool in concept art.
- ph0rque 16y ago
  Your analysis is way too conservative. An analysis by Tesla Motors some time ago calculated that if you drive the Roadster an average of 35 miles a day, you need about 105ft^2 of solar panels to produce all the electricity for it, assuming 18%-efficient solar panels. [1] The Tesla Roadster has an area, when viewed from the top, of 72ft^2. [2] That means if you were able to cover it with solar panels that were 27% efficient, you could power it just from the power it produced. As far as your last point, I agree: I'd rather put the solar panels on the garage roof, where I can somewhat control how much sunlight it gathers, than on the car. 1. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/electric-cars-and-photovoltaic-solar-cells http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/electric-cars-and-photovolta... 2. http://www.netcarshow.com/tesla/2008-roadster/ http://www.netcarshow.com/tesla/2008-roadster/
  - jws 16y ago
    Good numbers in the Tesla Roadster wikipedia introduction. wikipedia: The tesla roadster use 490 kiljoules per kilometer. compute: Our 30 megajoules above will take us 38 miles. Of course I'm still using mythical 100% efficient solar cells on a biggish flat roof and all sunny days, and Tesla used mythical shape hugging solar cells on all of their exposed surfaces. I still think the best solution for a solar powered car is to place your solar cells the south western deserts near LA and pull what power you need from the grid. That way you get a lot more power delivered from your cells.
metamemetics 16y ago
The future of electric cars involves battery swap stations, not generating the electricity themselves. For example, you go to a gas station, and a fully charged battery is mechanically swapped for your drained battery. Would take 30 seconds and your car is back to full. Then the drained batteries are recharged at the station while you are already off driving around. This obviously could not take place for a while due to issues of standardization. But its more likely the solar panels will be on the gas station or power plant servicing it than on your car.
- jnw2 16y ago
  I'm not convinced you need battery swap stations for personal vehicles. The Nissan Leaf has a 500 VDC, 125A quick charge connector, which allows 80% charge of its ~23 kWH battery in a half hour. If you have a similar wattage charging option in a car with a 200+ mile range battery, it may turn out that the time that you will spend for lunch/restroom breaks in a typical 500 mile day of driving will be enough to recharge your battery enough, assuming you start the day with the battery topped off, and all of the restaurants and rest stops have charging stations. (But I suspect the restaurants will see early adoption of charging stations as a way to attract customers/advertise their business.) The trucking industry may well benefit from swap stations, though. The Tesla Roadster is something like 1/4 or 1/3 battery by weight. The entire tractor of a typical tractor trailer rig is probably a bit less than 1/4 of the total rig by weight, and the tractor can't be 100% battery. This will probably translate to a somewhat shorter range. On the other hand, at 60 MPH, wind resistance is probably what consumes most of the energy, and that is not strictly proportional to the weight as you scale up from personal automobile to tractor trailer.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    So 3 factors shape this market: batterycell tech, charging station tech, vehicle tech. The outcome depends on the rate these 3 develop relative to one another. Perhaps we could graph and predict if we had enough data? Perhaps charging station tech advances the quickest. A business produces commercial chargers and markets them to trendy coffee shops with strip mall parking (that are likely to have "green" customers) or perhaps to non-munincipally owned parking garages in urban areas. And another startup develops and markets commercial chargers for households with garages. Capitalizing on a decentralization trend (computers in every home) has great business potential. But the venture risk might be too high due and corresponding probability of success too low for this particular paradigm to take hold. Battery swapping for trucking has the advantage of being a smaller, easier to target market. But the disadvantage of less electric vehicle tech.

FluidDjango 16y ago

Well, as much as I'd like to believe it... a report from "Solar Energy Industry Association" is not a very independent analysis. And there's the problem with presenting a bar graph showing linear growth over the next few years, followed by a text that says the claim is for "exponential" growth over the next few years.

humbledrone 16y ago
The graph does not show growth increasing linearly, as you say. What it shows is that the rate of growth is increasing linearly, which indicates that there is an acceleration in how fast solar power capacity is being created. Thus, the growth of installed power plants will in fact be increasing quadratically. In layman's terms, quadratic growth is often referred to (incorrectly) as "exponential" growth. If the article included a graph of the total solar power capacity over time, it would indeed appear to be increasing "exponentially."
zshahan 16y ago
however, they do have more data than just about anyone, so they are better fit to do such analyses

ojbyrne 16y ago

Having just worked at a company that installs solar panels, one thing was obvious - the use of solar panels was driven largely by government incentives, that are steadily being cut back. Perhaps the cost will drop enough over time to make up for the loss of those government incentives, but I don't think that's a sure thing.

bugsy 16y ago

Um, no one sees any problems with that chart? Every single point except the first one for the current year is theoretical and assume projections of increases per year that are more than total current capacity. That's like taking the US GNP and making a projection that we will undergo 150% growth the next two years, then stabilize into linear growth after that at the same rate. Saying that things are "blowing up" currently just ain't so. Where is the 2009 to 2010 curve, and how did they get the starting point in 2010 when the year isn't even over yet. Sorry, but this is clearly an article placed by solar panel salesmen.

zshahan 16y ago
if you read through the article, you'll see that solar capacity more than doubled from 2009-2010. it would be nice if it included previous growth, which actually was similar. but this is more about the future based on what is happening now and expected in the future... i'm sure they used the previous years' data though & showing those data in such a graph would be useful as well. however, the site covers that regularly, so I think the regular readers are quite familiar with the info.
- bugsy 16y ago
  We might want to clarify here that you are a professional writer for the site in question and the author of the given post; also you post a similar comment there in response to a similar question. Also, despite having access to the alleged pre-2010 data in question that you say is well known to regular readers on your site you provide no links to demonstrate where this data might be. By the way, on another topic, you need to check out your site in Safari, there is a fatal javascript loop. Probably a bug in Safari since it doesn't manifest in other browsers but it should still be addressed.

DougWebb 16y ago

The most amazing thing about solar energy is clearly it's ability to enable extrapolating a trend line from a single data point, and an estimated one at that. How efficient!

Helianthus16 16y ago

Hate to say it, but this felt... spammy. They didn't include any trending data from now, they just... kinda drew a line upwards? Yeah, solar power is cool, it's growing and reasonable to assume it will continue doing so. Article's rather light on information, though.

dmfdmf 16y ago

Harvesting the power of government stimulus.

zshahan 16y ago
a lot more government money goes into other forms of energy, though