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I recently bought a set of 360 watt panels from LG and not more than a couple months later they came about with 400 watt panels in the same form factor (40” x 6
by state_less 5y ago
I recently bought a set of 360 watt panels from LG and not more than a couple months later they came about with 400 watt panels in the same form factor (40” x 66”). Even though that can be frustrating, I am glad the tech is improving at a good clip.
While we wait for sorely needed battery cost reductions, it’s good to look at areas where we can ‘make hay while the sun is shining’. For example, train ML models during sunny days. Other industries might be aluminum, desalination, ice making (i.e. cooling), and other production (ideas welcome).
- ekianjo 5y ago> it’s good to look at areas where we can ‘make hay while the sun is shining’ I hope not, it would be really backwards if we had to adjust everything we do to sunlight. Imagine if you can't do proper work during rainy seasons?
- Whatarethese 5y agoHow much did those 360w panels run you?
- ericwooley 5y agoIt seems like the battery issue is actually a solved problem. Just a matter of getting it done. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric... https://www.npr.org/transcripts/620288114 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/620288114 Maybe someone smarter can tell me why pumped storage is actually not going to work, or why we don't have more of it already
- credit_guy 5y agoThere are multiple options to store energy from day to night, including pumped storage. The really big challenge is to store energy from summer to winter. When you store energy to use it at night, you only need to store about 12 hours worth of energy consumption, when you store it for winter, you are talking about months of consumption.
- fighterpilot 5y agoWould DC lines between countries solve this?
- cfn 5y agoThere are already some DC lines out there. I remember reading about one run starting in South Africa that runs north and it approached some multiple of the wave length of regular AC which would create too much radition (like an antena does).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nicoburns 5y agoStorong from summer to winter doesn't sound practical to me. Better just to overprovision generation (and do some strong load shifting away from low-generation periods for non-essential energy use)
- nl 5y agoIt's extremely rare to need to store months of energy at grid scale. Wind power works really well in winter as well as summer. In many places solar works sufficiently well in winter given the lower consumption levels due to lower air conditioning usage.
- goodcanadian 5y agoThis is true in a lot of places. However, in the places that I am most familiar with, energy consumption is MUCH higher in the winter due to heating . . . This may be where the international HVDC lines come in (that a sibling comment of yours mentioned), I suppose.
- distances 5y agoI don't think any country in the north would rely on imported energy for winter survival. I think pretty much every country even in EU counts that critical enough to warrant domestic capacity.
- peterpost2 5y agoHard to build, not a lot of places near cities where this can be done large scale and mainly: you really cant store that much energy there, both getting the water and producing power from it later is not that efficient. Pumped storage is not a solution except for some specific places in the world.
- Const-me 5y ago> why pumped storage is actually not going to work, or why we don't have more of it already (1) Requires a lot of land. (2) It needs a height difference, at the required scale prohibitively expensive to make an artificial one. (3) Requires lots of water.
- elihu 5y agoSomething I've heard that's non-obvious is that pumped hydro doesn't work well unless the altitude change happens over a small-ish horizontal distance. It's no good to have a thousand feet of height difference if it happens over a hundred miles. (I'm not sure if this can be mitigated by making the pipes bigger to reduce drag, but I guess there must be a point beyond which it isn't really practical.)
- pfdietz 5y agoPHES has been underestimated in the past because people looked only at existing waterways. Allowing PHES to be built off rivers radically expands its potential, to be orders of magnitude larger than necessary. There is still some geographical constraint, but transmission helps with that. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php
- pjc50 5y agoIt requires a naturally occurring basin to work, so there's not a huge number of suitable locations. The capital cost is huge, it's very disruptive of the land, and up till now very little storage market. The UK basically has two, Dinorwig and Cruachan, and they're used for managing the demand peaks.
- hannob 5y agoThere already is a lot of pumped storage. It's the most important energy storage technology today. The biggest problem with it is that you can't built it everywhere.
- taneq 5y agoIt's great if you have a steep hill nearby. Otherwise it can be very expensive to construct.
- colordrops 5y agoI believe most solar is sold by the watt, so you aren't gonna get a better deal by getting a more efficient panel, other than saving roof space.
- hef19898 5y agoSolar modules are priced per Watt peak, Wp, which is the nominal max power output. And the Wp prices are dropping every year.
- otherme123 5y agoLets suposse you need 10kW to fulfill your needs. You can buy 10000/350=29 panels today at $200 each, or 25 400W panels tomorrow for $200 each. Saving $800 and roof space for the same output.
- t8e56vd4ih 5y agothat's exactly what efficiency means for solar panels
- cfn 5y agoPossibly the new 400W panels replaced the 360W for the same unit price. This happens every now and then.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoLabour cost is already on par with panels itself and probably going to be like 10x in 10 years.
- kragen 5y agoMaybe for rooftop solar. For utility-scale solar it won't work out like that. Imagine it's 02031 and you're running a utility-scale solar company and you want to put in a bid on Egypt's latest PPE RFQ for a 100-megawatt solar farm. The market price for PV modules is down to US$0.018 as you predict above, but the labor cost to install them is US$0.18, so your construction costs are US$198k + balance of plant. So, to break even, you need to make at least US$0.198/Wp from the PPE, and so do your competitors who are trying to underbid you. In this scenario, if you can find some way to automate 10% of the installation labor, you can save US$18,000 and underbid the competition by 5% (more realistically: 2.5%, because of balance-of-plant costs), guaranteeing you win the PPE. That's an environment that produces extremely strong incentives to invest in automation, and extremely favorable circumstances as well: on site at the solar plant, you control the entire environment except for, like, dust storms. And there's plenty of room for even very large machinery. Think about the scale of the draglines, excavators, and shovels used in open-pit coal mining. Some of these have hundred-meter-long booms; they can reach across an entire city block without walking. (They move by walking because they're too big for wheels or tracks.) Now consider that the available solar energy resource is three orders of magnitude larger than coal ever was, and instead of a mountain-sized coal seam you're mining a country-sized "seam" of sunlight.
- leroman 5y agoTitanium production also uses lots of energy
- opencl 5y agoIce storage air conditioning is already a thing in some places to take advantage of cheap electricity at night, though it doesn't make as much sense in the context of solar. Maybe it would fit well with wind. I think it will be very difficult to convince industrial operations that currently run as close to 24/7 as possible that they should just leave all of their expensive equipment idling half the time, unless the electricity price difference is made extremely large.
- hannob 5y agoIt is actually quite simple to convince industry: An industrial facility will do that if the incentives are aligned that it makes them more money. The interesting thing is: The really challenging part of electricity storage isn't that much. Usually wind+solar complement each other fine. It depends on the location, but the challenge is usually something like 2-4 weeks in the winter when there's little sun and little wind. I.e. an industrial facility would only need to shut down in a very limited timeframe to have a huge effect on grid stability.
- hef19898 5y agoIt is quite funny that in Germany every energy hungry industry is looking since the last decade to produce flexible enough to benefit from negative and cheap electricity prices during certain periods. Examples I know of first hand are graphite kathodes and electrodes (the process can be stopped for hours as long as temperature doesn't drip under a certain threshold) and paper. Continuous chemical manufacturing is having a harder time so, but they are looking into ways to store process heat for later use and generating needed heat for storage. Nothing came from that at on of previous employers so. Funny is that these same companies, already now making a small fortune from these initiatives, are complaining about electricity prices and base load stability. One of the best complementary sources to renewables are, besides existing nuclear plants, modern gas turbines.
- pfdietz 5y agoHow is nuclear a good complementary source to renewables? You complement renewables with a source of flexibility, not another source of inflexibility.
- Adrig 5y agoHydrogen could be interesting as energy storage in this configuration. And hydrogen-based kerosene would make airplanes carbon-neutral but is really energy intensive
- seb1204 5y agoNo it is not. Stop the straw man argument. Hydrogen has been talked about 10 years ago and the technology is still in its beginnings compared to most solar components nowadays. Hydrogen is also increasingly used by the fissile/carbon industry as a decoy to keep their gas on longer to make hydrogen.
- iamthemonster 5y ago"Hydrogen" is a fundamentally different thing to "solar". There is no "straw man argument" being made because it's comparing apples and pears. The only purpose of hydrogen is to make energy in one point in space & time and then use it in another point of your choice without CO2 emissions. Solar is to convert sunlight to electrical energy, but you don't get to control when the sun is shining. The technology to generate hydrogen is also completely mature and has been since before I was born, whether we are talking steam methane reforming or electrolysis. It's just not very cheap.
- smegger001 5y agoexcept hydrogen is a horrible option. It is hard to store safely, it is highly explosive, energy expensive to produce vs the energy you get back out, it damages its own holding vessels via hydrogen embitterment, outside of a few niche areas it in generally a bad option.
- hef19898 5y agoNo idea about energy consumption, so I would assume using dirt cheap solar in remote places with defacto zero variable production costs (over simplified, but this is one reason wind and solar are pricing out other sources on the German spot market which ignores fix costs) might change that. Long term storage of hydrogen is quite easy so. It can be stored in thermal oil, rendering it inert. In thay form it isn't even considered dangerous goods for transportation anymore. Source: I consulted a green hydrogen project on logistics a while ago.
- Faaak 5y agoI installed solar myself last year. I was able to buy 320Wp panels for 160€. Last week I bought some for my parents and they were 370Wp@119€. The frustration quickly lessens when you think that prices 10years ago were nearly 5-fold
- theallan 5y agoWhere did you get them? Prices here in the UK are double or treble that!
- jhoechtl 5y agoI use my seldom used 100A tractor battery for buffer. Instead of reminding myself every couple of months to keep it charged (I use it like three times a year), its now on purpose. I have a guard to prevent the lead-acid battery from a deep decharge.
- fortran77 5y agoI think if solar is used simply to charge electric cars--many of which sit idle during peak sunlight hours--it could be a huge win.
- eraserj 5y agoWe'll probably be able to store actual light in some sort of microresonators and release it slowly at night onto solar panels.
- aldonius 5y agoAIUI, Aluminium refining can't usefully be scaled with electricity availability. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall–Héroult_process#Cell_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall–Héroult_process#Cell_oper... for an overview.