3 ms·

If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with. The important shift btw is no

If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with. The important shift btw is not from coal and nuclear to renewables, it's from fossil fuels for heating and transportation and industry to electricity. If we figure out how to build fusion power plants safely for cheap in a few decades, we will already have set up our infrastructure to run on electricity instead on carbon. Cutting energy usage is just a nice side effect of switching from 30% efficient ICEs to 80% efficient electric cars and from heating with gas to heating with a heat pump.

whoooooo123 6y ago
> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with. Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? What do we do with the panels when they reach the end of their lifecycle twenty years from now? What do we do when it's nighttime in the Sahara?
- adrianN 6y ago
  Panels are almost exclusively sand by weight. When panels are at the end of their life we either recycle them into new panels or simply store them somewhere. They're not particularly difficult to store safely. Right now there is not much recycling going on because there simply isn't the volume of old panels available to make this interesting from an economic perspective. To cover nights in the Sahara we use some of the absurd excess energy we get from covering the whole desert to make some Hydrogen or Methane and convert that back to electricity. If we don't want PV and gas synthesis for some reason to we can also just store heat in molten salt in solar-thermal installations and drive steam turbines. That's just a bit more expensive than PV today.
- imtringued 6y ago
  https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn I'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? The are no rare-Earth minerals in silicon solar cells.
  - whoooooo123 6y ago
    D'oh. TIL
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Why does this canard about rare earths in PV show up in the comments to every one of these nuclear posts? Where did you hear this, and why did you believe it?

whoooooo123 6y ago

> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with. Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? What do we do with the panels when they reach the end of their lifecycle twenty years from now? What do we do when it's nighttime in the Sahara?

adrianN 6y ago
Panels are almost exclusively sand by weight. When panels are at the end of their life we either recycle them into new panels or simply store them somewhere. They're not particularly difficult to store safely. Right now there is not much recycling going on because there simply isn't the volume of old panels available to make this interesting from an economic perspective. To cover nights in the Sahara we use some of the absurd excess energy we get from covering the whole desert to make some Hydrogen or Methane and convert that back to electricity. If we don't want PV and gas synthesis for some reason to we can also just store heat in molten salt in solar-thermal installations and drive steam turbines. That's just a bit more expensive than PV today.
imtringued 6y ago
https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn I'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.
baybal2 6y ago
> Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? The are no rare-Earth minerals in silicon solar cells.
- whoooooo123 6y ago
  D'oh. TIL
pfdietz 6y ago
Why does this canard about rare earths in PV show up in the comments to every one of these nuclear posts? Where did you hear this, and why did you believe it?