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Arab states are embracing solar power
- yaacov 7y agohttps://outline.com/9UKJg6 https://outline.com/9UKJg6
- Vysero 7y agoThanks for that!
- Rochus 7y agoThen they can pump oil using solar energy.
- vmception 7y agoThat's a good way to pay for the panels.
- chickenpotpie 7y agoCould be used to solve the duck curve too. Use excess solar to pump oil in the day and then use oil for power at night.
- Gibbon1 7y agoUsing peeking plants mornings and at night seems like a no brainer stop gap.
- Tade0 7y agoIts 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of energy This is one thing I don't get: why do journalists confuse units so often?
- chickenpotpie 7y agoProbably because a lot of units are synonyms in normal English aren’t synonyms in science. If you look up synonyms for energy power is one of them. Just like mass and weight.
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- leephillips 7y agoMost of them that I know have never taken a science course (aside from watered-down science for humanities majors courses) and are basically innumerate. EDIT: except science journalists, of course, some of whom have a real science background.
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- oh_sigh 7y agoI'm fairly sure 90+% of the population couldn't tell you exactly what a watt, vs a gigawatt, vs a kilowatt, vs a kilowatt hour is. For most people, these units are just opaque names with vague concepts associated with them(ie kilowatt hours measures how much power you used in your home). And journalists are just members of the population, so it shouldn't be surprising that mistakes occur. A normal person's interaction with the electrical world is extremely limited, so there is little utility in having any kind of understanding of it. I'd be much more worried if journalists were confusing, say, distance measurements with weight measurements, or something like that.
- kragen 7y agoThis is a case where journalists are, for once, not confusing units. A square meter of solar panels produces about 200 watts peak, 50 watts round-the-clock average†. A gigawatt is a billion watts, so that's about 5 million square meters or 20 million square meters of solar panels, depending on whether they're talking about peak or average power. A journalist confusing units might have said something like "Its 6 million panels produce 3600 gigawatt hours," without bothering to tell you whether that's per day, per month, or per year. But it's perfectly correct to say that a panel or a solar plant produces some number of gigawatts. † Yes, this depends on the type of panel and the location. Some panels are a little higher efficiency, some are a little lower efficiency, and the ones we use on satellites are a lot higher efficiency. And different places have more or less sun. Typical numbers are 1000 W/m² of "solar constant" nominal maximum insolation, 16%–21% efficiency (ratio of insolation to energy produced), and 15%–30% capacity factor (ratio of average power to peak power).
- threwrwe23423 7y agoDo you know which country has the most/largest Solar power plants in the world ? India. This is slightly meta - but why is it that no good news about India is never news in the Anglo-Saxon world ? We see Pulitzers being given out for coverage of 'India removing Kashmir's "independence"', USCIRF, an agency composed of Christian fundamentalists classify it in red, and then you have Britain and Europe, where the hatred is at a whole other level. I see how China is treated with such egregious racial hatred, and it's hard not to think of this in historical terms. Perhaps a new pan-Asian movt. is necessary in this atmosphere of the West's nostalgia for brutal imperialism.
- danans 7y agoNot sure what you're referring to: Kamuthi: The world's largest solar power project https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-39963455/kamuthi-the-world-s-largest-solar-power-project https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-39963455/kamuthi-the-... How India's 'smart villages' are centralising solar power https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36681112 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36681112 Seeing the light: How India is embracing solar power https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39844446 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39844446 India doubles down on solar, gas at coal's expense as electricity use falls https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-solar/india-doubles-down-on-solar-gas-at-coals-expense-as-electricity-use-falls-idUSKBN22G08C https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-solar/india-doubles...
- duxup 7y agoOf all places that could benefit, those places seem high on the list. I grew up in a state with tons of wind, but wind energy was hardly ever used (outside the old farmer windmills that were largely around because they looked cool). It was a great candidate for wind power but the local power companies were already heavy net exporters of power, coal, hydro electric. There just wasn't the incentive despite a lot of availability.
- k__ 7y agoHere in Germany many people simply are against wind-power-plants. They think they're ugly, loud, and dangerous.
- jseliger 7y agoThe rule of thumb seems to be, "Everyone is against everything, but everyone still wants power, and preferably cheap power." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958
- baxtr 7y agoI think it’s just a little subtler than that: “I’m not against it in general, but not in my backyard/neighborhood/ town/state...”
- fragmede 7y agoThere's a push back against NIMBYism with YIMBYism (Yes in my backyard!), but that's as fraught with politics as ever, with aspersions that everyone's in some elses' pocket. It's frustrating, to say the least.
- mhh__ 7y agoBut don't worry guys, we're only burning coal to produce 40% of our power!
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- chakerb 7y agoA lot of solar panels were insalled where I live compared to none five years ago. However their only use case here is to pump water out of the ground. The prices of the panel don't make them good investment for home usage. And even the government don't provide enough incentives to invest in them.
- dwaltrip 7y agoDo you have numbers?
- chakerb 7y agoWell, we have only one company installing solar panels in a ~25 km radius. And they're installing around 3 installation per month, each have 8 large panels.I don't have the exact number of how many watt they generate. But they are capable of powering pumps that pulls 12 liters per second.
- kragen 7y agoYou're probably mistaken [edit: no, I was wrong] about whether they're good investments for home usage and whether government subsidies would be needed, but maybe you live in a country where import tariffs make the panels cost a lot more than they cost on the open market. By "large" do you mean something more like 0.01 m², 0.1 m², 1 m², 10 m², or 100 m²? Any of those is a "large panel" in some frame of reference.
- chakerb 7y agoThey're not a good investment due to high cost of the panels compared to the price of electricity. Which to be fair is heavily subsided be the state. I'm looking forward to install ones myself, but I'm in the 90th percentile of people in my country that can afford to write big check upfront for power for home usage. Again most of the usage now is limited to agriculture since it makes sense there financially. By large I mean around 2m² each. Not sure the best size to capture the most out of the sun. But we're at the edge of the Sahara desert, so the climate is a little bit helping there.
- Mizza 7y agoTo quote the poet Christopher George Latore Wallace: "Number four, know you've heard this before, Never get high, on your own supply."
- Vysero 7y agoTwo quotes from this article I really like, first the opener: "TWO MILLENNIA after the ancient Egyptians dropped their solar deity, Ra, their descendants are rediscovering the power of the sun." and then the closer: “Why spend money taking fuel out of the ground and processing it rather than relying on God-given free sun and wind?” Very well done, kudos! I see renewable gaining momentum here in the US as well and it's very exciting to see. In fact, I have recently just invested in BEP, and while it's not a majority share of my investment portfolio, it's quickly become one of my favorite investments.
- olodus 7y agoSorry couldn't read it because of the pay wall, but I am interested - how do they solve the storage and transport problem? Always thought that was one of the troubles with solar for much of the region.
- greglindahl 7y agoWhat storage and transport problem? This is a region that has a lot of sun, a lot of empty land near cities, and a lot of electricity usage for air conditioning. They can install a lot of solar before they need to worry about storage and transport.
- kragen 7y agoMaybe the problem of transporting the energy produced there to China or the Netherlands or something? The problem with selling energy in Morocco or Egypt is that the people there are, by and large, poor, so they can't pay you very much.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoEasier to generate it locally, which people in both China and the Netherlands do.
- kragen 7y agoIndeed, and China has the Gobi, but the Netherlands' total solar resource is only a few terawatts, while hundreds to tens of thousands of terawatts are potentially available to be imported. https://www.en-tran-ce.org/custom/uploads/2019/02/Renewable-Energy-January-2019.pdf https://www.en-tran-ce.org/custom/uploads/2019/02/Renewable-... seems to say that last January the Netherlands had 4300 MW(p) of solar PV generating capacity, which produced 0.4 petajoules. If that's correct, the capacity factor of solar PV in the Netherlands averaged 3.5% that month, which is shockingly low, about three times lower than even Germany and nearly ten times worse than equatorial desert solar power plants — although January is one of the worst months, and eyeballing the graphs it looks like the year-round average is closer to 1.3 PJ per month, giving a deplorable 10% capacity factor similar to Germany's. Until and unless panel prices drop dramatically again, situating the panels somewhere sunnier will produce three times as much energy, enough to pay for constructing quite a bit of energy transmission infrastructure. But what happens if panel prices do drop dramatically? Well, if this appalling 10% is a typical capacity factor for utility-scale PV in the Netherlands, the total solar resource is only 4.2 terawatts, of which about 900 gigawatts is available with typical 21%-efficient solar panels. This is an order of magnitude higher than the country's current energy demand, but of course that means that you'd have to cover about 10% of the countryside with solar panels to fulfill that demand from PV alone — and seasonal variability means you'd have to triple that if demand is constant year-round. Covering a third of the Netherlands with PV panels is probably not possible, and covering more than 100% of it is definitely not possible. So the new kinds of energy-intensive industry that will become possible if PV panels get cheaper still will be out of reach of indigenous PV production.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/yOzVk https://archive.md/yOzVk
- kragen 7y agohttps://archive.md/yOzVk/27be7b61acdd90c7df458546e7e91676df910193.jpg https://archive.md/yOzVk/27be7b61acdd90c7df458546e7e91676df9...
- kragen 7y agoThe countries mentioned here are among the countries with the largest solar resources in the world. — ⁂ — It's important to understand the magnitudes we're talking about: world marketed energy consumption, excluding food but including non-electric energy uses like shipping, is² about 19 terawatts (160 terawatt hours per year or 14000 Mtoe per year); total terrestrial insolation is roughly 130 000 terawatts (at 1000 W/m², at ground level) to 170 000 terawatts (at 1361 W/m², above the atmosphere); and the Ghawar supergiant oil field contained a bit over 100 billion barrels of oil before the humans started extracting it³. At the standard value of 37 MJ/ℓ, 100 billion barrels is almost 600 exajoules⁴ ⁵; if you burned it all in one year it would also produce 19 terawatts. Total world oil "production" is about 81 million barrels a day⁶, which works out to 5.5 terawatts, more than a quarter of world marketed energy consumption (although a significant minority of that oil is made into asphalt and plastics rather than burned). So current world marketed energy consumption is a bit over 0.1% of total terrestrial insolation, and oil is only able to supply a small part (≈20%) of world marketed energy consumption. The solar resource, like the enhanced geothermal resource and the fusion-fuel resource of the oceans, is truly immense, dwarfing fossil fuel consumption. Morocco, to take one of the listed countries as an example, is 710 000 km² of mostly cloudless desert¹. If solar plants there get a 30% capacity factor (typical for temperate deserts, maybe a bit low for Morocco) and use low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels, they'll produce 48 W/m² (on average around the clock), which is 48 MW/km²; the country as a whole could produce 34 terawatts, about double world marketed energy consumption. — ⁂ — Historically speaking, the humans have burned fossil fuels because their photovoltaic panel manufacturing was too inefficient; until the 1990s, it took more energy to produce a solar panel than it would produce during its design lifetime of 30 years. Now low-cost solar modules cost €0.18 per (peak) watt⁷, following a dramatic fall in crystalline silicon PV module prices from €2.17 per peak watt in May 2009⁰ to €0.19 in December 2018, representing dramatic improvements in efficiency of some 22% per year; since then, a price-fixing cartel then announced at Davos has prevented further improvements in efficiency from further lowering wholesale prices. Still, their cost is now comparable to the cost of the heat engines and electric generators needed to harness fossil fuels for purposes other than raw heat, exclusive of fuel and other operational expenses. It's commonly commented that the sun doesn't shine at night, so solar power only works at night if you have transcontinental power transmission lines (not yet existing, probably HVDC, perhaps a strategic vulnerability similar to Twitter) or utility-scale energy storage. The need for storage can make solar energy roughly as expensive at night as fossil-fuel energy, but during the day it's considerably cheaper in areas with large solar resources. If transcontinental HVDC becomes a real thing, the countries mentioned could become bigger exporters of solar energy than they ever were of oil energy. — ⁂ — One more note about Morocco: Morocco has a lot of Arabs, but it also has a lot of Berbers¹; it seems sort of flamebaity to describe it as an "Arab state"! — ⁰ https://web.archive.org/web/20100722072720/http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-index-solar-pv-modules.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100722072720/http://www.solars... ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar ⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_%28unit%29#Oil_barrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_%28unit%29#Oil_barrel ⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density ⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ... ⁷ https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/ https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/
- dvirsky 7y agoI wonder how much usage of solar water heaters exists in these countries. It's a dead simple technology that works amazingly well in sunny areas, and saves tons of electricity when deployed at scale.
- mulderc 7y agoWhen I visited Turkey years ago I noticed that solar water heating seemed to be all over the place judging by what was on people’s roofs. As a kid our house had a solar water heating system that eventually broke and we could never find anyone that could fix it. I briefly looked into if my current house could get one and have yet to find a local company that installs them.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think current economics favors using solar panels to power a hybrid electric water heater.
- remus 7y agoI'm not sure about the middle east but they're incredibly common in the Mediterranean (Greece, turkey, Spain etc).
- jillesvangurp 7y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2020/04/28/abu-dhabi-cheapest-solar-power/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2020/04/28/abu-dh... Abu Dhabi just secured a bid for a 2GW solar plant at a record 1.35 dollar cents per KWH.
- ABeeSea 7y agoUnfortunately a lot of that solar power will go towards air conditioning. Right now, Qatar is literally air conditioning the outside to make the heat from the sidewalks less deadly. Better than running the ACs in oil, but the amount of AC required to make these places survivable by humans is only going to grow. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-environment/climate-change-qatar-air-conditioning-outdoors/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-e...
- theboywho 7y agoWhy unfortunately? Are you suggesting that air conditioning sidewalks in Qatar is a luxury? Because the only other option I can think of is for people to leave Qatar. It’s far from a luxury.
- ABeeSea 7y agoUnfortunate for climate change. The heat from those ACs has to go somewhere. And they emit greenhouse gases. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/countries-crank-ac-emissions-potent-greenhouse-gases-are-likely-skyrocket https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/countries-crank-ac-e...
- Tade0 7y agoThose greenhouse gases have of course a measurable effect, but I believe it's still the energy source that's responsible for most of the carbon footprint here. Especially if the units are supplied with electricity generated from burning oil.
- tonmoy 7y agoIf all AC is running on solar power then would it be heating up the earth anymore than the sunlight would have on its own?
- manfredo 7y agoYes, because air conditioning units have net positive heat generation. Though they usually use water as their heat sinks, and if that water is flushed then it effectively eliminates the heat in a practical sense if not a thermodynamic sense. Reply in comment, since HN is rate limiting my VPN. > Yes, because air conditioning units have net positive heat generation. Though they usually use water as their heat sinks, and if that water is flushed then it effectively eliminates the heat in a practical sense if not a thermodynamic sense. This is assuming that the terrain without solar panels would convert as much energy into heat as the solar panels are collecting. In reality the terrain without solar panels reflects a lot of the energy it receives, whereas solar panels are optimized to absorb as much of it as possible.