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Regarding solar placement, we can place panels on housing and commercial buildings and parking spaces. Check out canopy style parking covers(sun protection)in t

Regarding solar placement, we can place panels on housing and commercial buildings and parking spaces. Check out canopy style parking covers(sun protection)in the southern US.

martythemaniak 8y ago
I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at your chosen location/latitude, then use the target city's electricity consumption to see how many of these solar installations will be required. Note, I'm talking solely about land-use requirements here, not cost/battery requirements etc. So covering cities in solar would work great if the overall electricity mix was 50% nuclear for base load, 50% solar/wind/hydro for peak times, but relying heavily on solar will bring its own issues.
- eloff 8y ago
  At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    Yeah, it's probably a conservative number. But the Toronto area (~20% of Canada's population) would not be much different from Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
    - eloff 8y ago
      5 Torontos worth of forest is nothing. In BC for just the last two years we lost forest half the size of Switzerland to fires. If you think how much land is cleared and maintained clear for agriculture in Canada, 5 Torontos is a rounding error. Land is cheap and abundant it's a non-issue for the kind of area we'd need to even power the whole world 100% on solar. Habit losses would be more than made up for by not continuing to accelerate climate change.
      - earthboundkid 8y ago
        Also, you can put solar panels on the roof of buildings in actual Toronto and not have to lose any additional footprint.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  No one has ever suggested that renewables = solar. Renewables are always a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and - eventually - wave.
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    Hydro is limited by your geography and largely tapped out. In Ontario it's about 20%. Trying to replace the remaining 80% of supply (plus future growth for EVs) with wind and solar (there's not much waves in Ontario) is an incredibly daunting proposition. Again, the mount of electricity consumption is public info. The amount of output a wind turbine or solar farm per km^2 is available. Put these together and ask yourself how easy would be to convince people to do this. Our old nuclear plants are our golden-egg-laying goose. Not only should we not kill it, other places should get their own.

Regarding solar placement, we can place panels on housing and commercial buildings and parking spaces. Check out canopy style parking covers(sun protection)in the southern US.

martythemaniak 8y ago

I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at your chosen location/latitude, then use the target city's electricity consumption to see how many of these solar installations will be required. Note, I'm talking solely about land-use requirements here, not cost/battery requirements etc. So covering cities in solar would work great if the overall electricity mix was 50% nuclear for base load, 50% solar/wind/hydro for peak times, but relying heavily on solar will bring its own issues.

eloff 8y ago
At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  Yeah, it's probably a conservative number. But the Toronto area (~20% of Canada's population) would not be much different from Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
  - eloff 8y ago
    5 Torontos worth of forest is nothing. In BC for just the last two years we lost forest half the size of Switzerland to fires. If you think how much land is cleared and maintained clear for agriculture in Canada, 5 Torontos is a rounding error. Land is cheap and abundant it's a non-issue for the kind of area we'd need to even power the whole world 100% on solar. Habit losses would be more than made up for by not continuing to accelerate climate change.
    - earthboundkid 8y ago
      Also, you can put solar panels on the roof of buildings in actual Toronto and not have to lose any additional footprint.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
No one has ever suggested that renewables = solar. Renewables are always a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and - eventually - wave.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  Hydro is limited by your geography and largely tapped out. In Ontario it's about 20%. Trying to replace the remaining 80% of supply (plus future growth for EVs) with wind and solar (there's not much waves in Ontario) is an incredibly daunting proposition. Again, the mount of electricity consumption is public info. The amount of output a wind turbine or solar farm per km^2 is available. Put these together and ask yourself how easy would be to convince people to do this. Our old nuclear plants are our golden-egg-laying goose. Not only should we not kill it, other places should get their own.