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Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid t

by cnasc 5y ago

Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?

spuz 5y ago
Apparently, about 12% of the land or 29,690 sq km in order to meet current energy demands (electricity, petrol, oil and gas). Apparently, only 6% of the country is currently built on which suggests that for any country of a similar latitude, you can estimate a land total of double that currently used per person. This does not take into account energy storage and assumes no energy is generated at night. https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rlt 5y ago
  Of course that 6% only counts land usage by humans. How many (additional) non-human habitats would you have to decimate to cover 12% of the land with (ugly) solar panels? Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back. Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
  - D-Coder 5y ago
    Put the solar panels over parking lots. Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier. (I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
  - formvoltron 5y ago
    Curious, do you find server farms also ugly to look at? To me both server racks and solar panels look like modern technology.
- kolinko 5y ago
  1 sq km = 100 hectares = 100 GWh of energy produced per year in northern Europe. 29000 sq km = 2900 TWh Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK. I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
  - formvoltron 5y ago
    This guy electrodacus.com swears that panels are so cheap now that it really only makes sense to heat with PV directly. He stores extra into an array of concrete slabs which then radiate out over the night. He built a special type of MPPT to orchestrate this flow of energy from PV into thermal mass. He lives in deep freeze Canada.
    - kolinko 5y ago
      Interesting. In Poland, where I live, I researched this recently, for my mother's house - and it won't work. The heat is needed from October until April, and most of that time solar panels generate close to zero electricity. In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/). I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.
ajuc 5y ago
Fun fact - solar energy production over a year only differs by a factor of 4 between worst and best reasonably inhabited places.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Another fun fact. When I installed my PV array, I got the alignment of one of them wrong by 1 degree (from due south). I looked up how much power I lost from this mistake ... not much, about 1%. Then I used the same tool to check what would have happened if I had installed them facing due north. To my surprise: only 15% less power!
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > only differs by a factor of 4 how is a factor of 4 "only". It's absurdly high.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Is it? Oil/coal/gas reserves differ by factors of millions. You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future. For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.
formvoltron 5y ago
Morocco or southern Spain isn't that far away.
socialdemocrat 5y ago
I have a bunch of renewable energy calculations here: https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calculations https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul... They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power. Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well. Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity. These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.

by cnasc 5y ago

Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?

spuz 5y ago

Apparently, about 12% of the land or 29,690 sq km in order to meet current energy demands (electricity, petrol, oil and gas). Apparently, only 6% of the country is currently built on which suggests that for any country of a similar latitude, you can estimate a land total of double that currently used per person. This does not take into account energy storage and assumes no energy is generated at night. https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rlt 5y ago
Of course that 6% only counts land usage by humans. How many (additional) non-human habitats would you have to decimate to cover 12% of the land with (ugly) solar panels? Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back. Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
- D-Coder 5y ago
  Put the solar panels over parking lots. Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier. (I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
- formvoltron 5y ago
  Curious, do you find server farms also ugly to look at? To me both server racks and solar panels look like modern technology.
kolinko 5y ago
1 sq km = 100 hectares = 100 GWh of energy produced per year in northern Europe. 29000 sq km = 2900 TWh Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK. I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
- formvoltron 5y ago
  This guy electrodacus.com swears that panels are so cheap now that it really only makes sense to heat with PV directly. He stores extra into an array of concrete slabs which then radiate out over the night. He built a special type of MPPT to orchestrate this flow of energy from PV into thermal mass. He lives in deep freeze Canada.
  - kolinko 5y ago
    Interesting. In Poland, where I live, I researched this recently, for my mother's house - and it won't work. The heat is needed from October until April, and most of that time solar panels generate close to zero electricity. In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/). I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.

ajuc 5y ago

Fun fact - solar energy production over a year only differs by a factor of 4 between worst and best reasonably inhabited places.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Another fun fact. When I installed my PV array, I got the alignment of one of them wrong by 1 degree (from due south). I looked up how much power I lost from this mistake ... not much, about 1%. Then I used the same tool to check what would have happened if I had installed them facing due north. To my surprise: only 15% less power!
jcelerier 5y ago
> only differs by a factor of 4 how is a factor of 4 "only". It's absurdly high.
- ajuc 5y ago
  Is it? Oil/coal/gas reserves differ by factors of millions. You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future. For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.

formvoltron 5y ago

Morocco or southern Spain isn't that far away.

socialdemocrat 5y ago

I have a bunch of renewable energy calculations here: https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calculations https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul... They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power. Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well. Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity. These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.