5 ms·

>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more v

>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow. >Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing. But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!

stopping 6y ago
>How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Thanks for clarification. But don't you find it misleading to amortize panel power generation across day and night? It makes it seem like you just need more panels to cover power demand in the evening and night .. when in reality, no amount of panels will ever work.
  - jlevers 6y ago
    I think that if you consider storage, then you can in fact amortize panel power generation across day and night, because you need more panels during the day to create the extra power that will be used at night (when none of the panels are actively generating power).
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      Then you have to over-build your infrastructure, not just for daily intermittency but also seasonal intermittency. So you have to add that to your calculation. But this point is moot anyway, because there is no battery technology that is capable of that much storage.
- EricE 6y ago
  Where are you getting sufficient batteries in sufficient quantities to store that theoretical 50% overnight? And on top of that were are you getting the additional batteries to provide extra capacities for when the sun is shining at less than 100% of optimal? And then where are you getting all the materials for those batteries? And what are you doing with all the waste from those batteries once they end their serviceable lifespan? If you seriously are concerned about the latent costs with nuclear power plants then you should do more than gloss over the storage issues with solar. And many of your concerns about nuclear fall apart if you don't assume we would continue to build reactors with the issues you point out. There are new designs like micro molten salt reactors that address in pretty signifiant ways the concerns you note. A lot fewer construction materials, greatly simplified designs and designs that don't rely on active cooling to prevent a meltdown. Designs that if the reactor systems are interrupted, the reactors coast to a shutdown naturally. It's not science fiction - its proven technology we've had since the 50's that was refined in the 70's but squashed because of politics and fear mongering. Maybe after China starts eating our lunch we'll take it seriously? Ha - probably not even then, unfortunately.
  - stopping 6y ago
    Did you accidentally reply to my comment? I didn't state any position on the issue, just offered a 3-sentence correction to someone else's comment.
epistasis 6y ago
A tremendous amount of material goes into building a nuclear reactor, ton after ton of rebar and concrete. If you look at the total mass of materials for a GW reactor, it's not so different than a GW of solar panels. If you are honestly worried about this, compare the amount of material that goes into a solar panel to the quantity of fuel needed to generate an equivalent amount of energy in that panels lifetime. Yet the damage we complain about with fossil fuels is not the mining damage, it's the change to the atmosphere. If this amount of material is really so stressful to you, compare the amount of material we use to just build the housing necessary for the world, to the amount of material needed to provide their energy needs. A typical single family roof has more than enough square footage to fully provide for all the energy needs of a household, now think of the orders of magnitude more material that are below that roof than the solar panels consist of. However far more of the panels are recyclable, and valuable enough to be recycled. There's aluminum, glass, etc. Solar also really works very well dual purposed with other land uses. Whether that's farming, or over parking lots, or on roofs. For dual purposing solar and farming on the same land, each use loses less than 50% productivity. Land use and pane waste are complete red herrings that don't pass a sniff test. They persist because there are powerful forces that keep on repeating these concerns, but to be truly concerned about them, one should be far far far more concerned about every single aspect of modern life. Since I never hear the people bemoaning solar pane waste also advocate for banning single family homes and more than 30 m^2 of living space per person, I'm not sure these complaints can be taken as good faith.
inter_netuser 6y ago
Excellent comment that will likely get downvoted into the oblivion here. Somehow nuclear waste is a huge problem, but waste from silicon production and decomissioning of solar panels isn't waste. Roof-solar is probably okay, but replacing baseload with batteries is so far-fetched, I'll believe it when i see it. Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions - everyone ignores that. Why is it ok for windmills to destroy climate and life? Since when that became the preferred way to destroy ecosystems?
- jacobolus 6y ago
  > Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions Domestic cats kill billions of birds every year.
  - inter_netuser 6y ago
    Indeed, pet ownership is form of animal abuse.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    Domestic cats kill sparrows. Windmills kill large endangered birds of prey like eagles.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      The point rather is: there are a ton of things that we build or do which kill birds: we clear habitat, eliminate food sources, dump pesticides and other toxic materials into the environment, build buildings and power lines, drive fast vehicles all over, keep predators as pets, etc. I'm sure many birds are killed by wind turbines (estimates I can find in a quick search indicate 100–300k per year), and by all means we should try to site wind farms away from migration routes and take whatever steps we can to make the turbines themselves safer for birds, and possibly even retrofit or decommission wind farms in sites which turn out to be especially deadly. However, it is not reasonable to look at this problem in isolation. If wind farms can drive coal power out of business faster, on net that is saving a huge number of birds and other wildlife. Ultimately global climate change is going to lead to mass extinction if our current trajectory is not altered very quickly. Wind power is one way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
nl 6y ago
There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. Hi from Australia. We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change. We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Singapore. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australian-outback-cattle-station-to-house-worlds-largest-solar-farm-powering-singapore https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australi... > Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. Solar panels are already over 90% recyclable, with some processes recycling up to 99%: https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewable-energy/solar-panel-recycling https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewab...
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change. Unpopulated by humans you mean. >humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade? Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
  - nl 6y ago
    > Unpopulated by humans you mean. Sure. This was in response to this: Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. > If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. This is untrue. This solar farm will take up 120 sq km (out of the 10,000 sq km cattle property), and is unlikely to cause any environmental issues from the panels themselves, since they'll just shade some areas of sand.
eightails 6y ago
> > There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. > There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Can't help but be reminded of this classic skit. "The ship was towed outside the environment." "...Into another environment." "No no, it's been towed beyond the environment." https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM
jacobolus 6y ago
Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). If you are worried about global habitat loss, start by figuring out how to make food production more space- and resource-efficient. After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; the infrastructure and energy required for our transportation networks; etc. Cutting down on space for solar panels is way way way down the list.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). Agriculture is a problem. If you add renewables, you now have TWO problems. And funny you should mention agriculture because one of the proposed solutions to get around renewable intermittency problem is to burn bio-fuels or bio-mass. This means we would be using land not just for agriculture for human consumption, but also to grow corn or trees or whatever to burn to support the renewable infrastructure. Here's a pellet advocacy group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM) touting how green Denmark is because it burns wooden pellets! This is the technology of future: growing trees to burn. I'm not against this by the way, and it's a nice way to reuse discarded saw dust, but we also live in a world with little renewable deployment. When we scale up renewable infrastructure there will be dedicated land to just growing bio-mass to support renewables. Anyway, the general problem is that renewables compound every other problem we need to solve around ecosystem collapse.

stopping 6y ago

>How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.

macspoofing 6y ago
Thanks for clarification. But don't you find it misleading to amortize panel power generation across day and night? It makes it seem like you just need more panels to cover power demand in the evening and night .. when in reality, no amount of panels will ever work.
- jlevers 6y ago
  I think that if you consider storage, then you can in fact amortize panel power generation across day and night, because you need more panels during the day to create the extra power that will be used at night (when none of the panels are actively generating power).
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    Then you have to over-build your infrastructure, not just for daily intermittency but also seasonal intermittency. So you have to add that to your calculation. But this point is moot anyway, because there is no battery technology that is capable of that much storage.
EricE 6y ago
Where are you getting sufficient batteries in sufficient quantities to store that theoretical 50% overnight? And on top of that were are you getting the additional batteries to provide extra capacities for when the sun is shining at less than 100% of optimal? And then where are you getting all the materials for those batteries? And what are you doing with all the waste from those batteries once they end their serviceable lifespan? If you seriously are concerned about the latent costs with nuclear power plants then you should do more than gloss over the storage issues with solar. And many of your concerns about nuclear fall apart if you don't assume we would continue to build reactors with the issues you point out. There are new designs like micro molten salt reactors that address in pretty signifiant ways the concerns you note. A lot fewer construction materials, greatly simplified designs and designs that don't rely on active cooling to prevent a meltdown. Designs that if the reactor systems are interrupted, the reactors coast to a shutdown naturally. It's not science fiction - its proven technology we've had since the 50's that was refined in the 70's but squashed because of politics and fear mongering. Maybe after China starts eating our lunch we'll take it seriously? Ha - probably not even then, unfortunately.
- stopping 6y ago
  Did you accidentally reply to my comment? I didn't state any position on the issue, just offered a 3-sentence correction to someone else's comment.

epistasis 6y ago

A tremendous amount of material goes into building a nuclear reactor, ton after ton of rebar and concrete. If you look at the total mass of materials for a GW reactor, it's not so different than a GW of solar panels. If you are honestly worried about this, compare the amount of material that goes into a solar panel to the quantity of fuel needed to generate an equivalent amount of energy in that panels lifetime. Yet the damage we complain about with fossil fuels is not the mining damage, it's the change to the atmosphere. If this amount of material is really so stressful to you, compare the amount of material we use to just build the housing necessary for the world, to the amount of material needed to provide their energy needs. A typical single family roof has more than enough square footage to fully provide for all the energy needs of a household, now think of the orders of magnitude more material that are below that roof than the solar panels consist of. However far more of the panels are recyclable, and valuable enough to be recycled. There's aluminum, glass, etc. Solar also really works very well dual purposed with other land uses. Whether that's farming, or over parking lots, or on roofs. For dual purposing solar and farming on the same land, each use loses less than 50% productivity. Land use and pane waste are complete red herrings that don't pass a sniff test. They persist because there are powerful forces that keep on repeating these concerns, but to be truly concerned about them, one should be far far far more concerned about every single aspect of modern life. Since I never hear the people bemoaning solar pane waste also advocate for banning single family homes and more than 30 m^2 of living space per person, I'm not sure these complaints can be taken as good faith.

inter_netuser 6y ago

Excellent comment that will likely get downvoted into the oblivion here. Somehow nuclear waste is a huge problem, but waste from silicon production and decomissioning of solar panels isn't waste. Roof-solar is probably okay, but replacing baseload with batteries is so far-fetched, I'll believe it when i see it. Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions - everyone ignores that. Why is it ok for windmills to destroy climate and life? Since when that became the preferred way to destroy ecosystems?

jacobolus 6y ago
> Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions Domestic cats kill billions of birds every year.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  Indeed, pet ownership is form of animal abuse.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Domestic cats kill sparrows. Windmills kill large endangered birds of prey like eagles.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    The point rather is: there are a ton of things that we build or do which kill birds: we clear habitat, eliminate food sources, dump pesticides and other toxic materials into the environment, build buildings and power lines, drive fast vehicles all over, keep predators as pets, etc. I'm sure many birds are killed by wind turbines (estimates I can find in a quick search indicate 100–300k per year), and by all means we should try to site wind farms away from migration routes and take whatever steps we can to make the turbines themselves safer for birds, and possibly even retrofit or decommission wind farms in sites which turn out to be especially deadly. However, it is not reasonable to look at this problem in isolation. If wind farms can drive coal power out of business faster, on net that is saving a huge number of birds and other wildlife. Ultimately global climate change is going to lead to mass extinction if our current trajectory is not altered very quickly. Wind power is one way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

nl 6y ago

There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. Hi from Australia. We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change. We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Singapore. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australian-outback-cattle-station-to-house-worlds-largest-solar-farm-powering-singapore https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australi... > Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. Solar panels are already over 90% recyclable, with some processes recycling up to 99%: https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewable-energy/solar-panel-recycling https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewab...

macspoofing 6y ago
>We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change. Unpopulated by humans you mean. >humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade? Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
- nl 6y ago
  > Unpopulated by humans you mean. Sure. This was in response to this: Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. > If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. This is untrue. This solar farm will take up 120 sq km (out of the 10,000 sq km cattle property), and is unlikely to cause any environmental issues from the panels themselves, since they'll just shade some areas of sand.

eightails 6y ago

> > There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. > There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Can't help but be reminded of this classic skit. "The ship was towed outside the environment." "...Into another environment." "No no, it's been towed beyond the environment." https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

jacobolus 6y ago

Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). If you are worried about global habitat loss, start by figuring out how to make food production more space- and resource-efficient. After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; the infrastructure and energy required for our transportation networks; etc. Cutting down on space for solar panels is way way way down the list.

macspoofing 6y ago
>Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than energy generation (half of all habitable land on Earth). Agriculture is a problem. If you add renewables, you now have TWO problems. And funny you should mention agriculture because one of the proposed solutions to get around renewable intermittency problem is to burn bio-fuels or bio-mass. This means we would be using land not just for agriculture for human consumption, but also to grow corn or trees or whatever to burn to support the renewable infrastructure. Here's a pellet advocacy group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM) touting how green Denmark is because it burns wooden pellets! This is the technology of future: growing trees to burn. I'm not against this by the way, and it's a nice way to reuse discarded saw dust, but we also live in a world with little renewable deployment. When we scale up renewable infrastructure there will be dedicated land to just growing bio-mass to support renewables. Anyway, the general problem is that renewables compound every other problem we need to solve around ecosystem collapse.