24 ms·
1 TW of solar to be deployed annually by 2030
- andy_ppp 4y agoIf we will have this much spare solar, can’t we just convert it to methane and reuse most of the current infrastructure for heating homes etc? The CO2 can be taken from the air…
- bryanlarsen 4y agoI highly doubt that we'll have significant spare solar. Energy is just way too useful and valuable. Once we get close to a situation where the price goes negative, somebody will figure out a way to turn the spare solar into dollars. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ and SpaceX are planning on turning solar and atmospheric CO2 into methane. Not spare solar, but dedicated solar. It'd be silly to use it to heat your house. If electricity is cheap enough to make the process viable, then a heat pump will save you a huge amount of money.
- _hypx 4y agoThat spare solar power will be used for hydrogen production most of the time.
- Iwan-Zotow 4y agoAnd where is it? I mean, CA duck is already there, but not a single cf of hydrogen produced
- ncmncm 4y agoFactories to make hydrogen electrolysers need to be built first. China got a jump on us and is selling electrolysers pretty cheap. Somebody is buying those.
- tuatoru 4y agoTo be cheap, they need to operate at multi-GW scale, have a long operating life, and good reliability.
- ncmncm 4y agoYou say so, but hydrogen production capacity is additive. More electrolysers, more hydrogen, up to the power available. But, as with solar, wind, and storage, prices will fall fast as production ramps up.
- tuatoru 4y agoWhich costs more to install, run and maintain: 100,000 10kW grid-connected PV installations, or one 1GW installation? I think it's the single installation. Likewise with hydrogen. Unless it is all used at the point of generation, and near enough at the time of generation (storing and transporting it is expensive energetically and in terms of capital assets, and risky), economies of scale apply. And domestic use isn't a good fit for "use it all now while the sun is shining".
- tuatoru 4y agoYes, advocates for hydrogen need to explain this. My guess: there are major engineering challenges that drive up the cost. Storing and transporting hydrogen (compressed, adsorbed/absorbed or liquid) are difficult.
- ncmncm 4y agoThe major use for hydrogen initially will be to push into underground reservoirs. It takes a long time to build out hydrogen handling infrastructure. After we are awash in cheap spare hydrogen, the handling infrastructure will grow by natural market forces. First things happen first.
- _hypx 4y agohttps://www.airproducts.com/news-center/2022/04/0422-air-products-and-world-energy-sustainable-aviation-fuel-facility-in-california https://www.airproducts.com/news-center/2022/04/0422-air-pro... A lot of facilities are coming online.
- discordance 4y agoOn very sunny days in Australia the price frequently goes negative already.
- ncmncm 4y agoThat won't last.
- FabHK 4y agoSynthesising fuel could become very interesting, as the entire infrastructure is there already. Might also be interesting for aviation, as batteries are not really practical for a few more decades, it seems to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel
- ncmncm 4y agoOnce LH2-fueled aircraft enter a market, kerosene-fueled craft will be wholly unable to compete. The rate will be limited by how fast retrofits or new airframes can be made, and secondarily by growth of LH2 synthesis infrastructure at major airports. Kerosene craft will be relegated to increasingly marginal routes. Amusingly, Russia could find itself fielding LH2 birds first just because they will need all new aircraft sooner than everybody else.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
- 41b696ef1113 4y agoAverage aircraft age in the USA is 14+ years. A new passenger jet costs some $100+ million. We cannot even approve unleaded aviation gas, I am unsure a transition to LH2 will be speedy.
- ncmncm 4y ago"General aviation" below turboprop-scale has been too small to command the attention needed for change. When you need an LH2 airframe to be able to stay in the market at all, that will accelerate conversion.
- danans 4y agoGenerating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from oversupply of renewables only makes sense for use cases that can't be easily electrified like aviation. The conversion process is very inefficient. Others here have pointed out that hydrogen could eventually be used directly in aviation, at which point hydrocarbon energy storage is even less relevant. Regarding home heating in the future, firstly the infrastructure we have is rapidly depreciating to the point of needing replacement: The gas distribution infrastructure in many areas is old and very expensive to maintain and operate, and furnaces only last a few decades at best. It makes more sense to electrolyse water to H2 and then convert to NH3 for long term storage, then convert that to electricity at a central plant in the heating season, and use the electricity to run heat pumps which can be 300+% efficient. Heat pumps even make sense (from a climate/CO2 perspective, not necessarily a household finance perspective) with the fossil natural gas derived electricity we still use today.
- aledalgrande 4y agoThis is a thing I'm wondering. In Europe houses are old (i.e. not well insulated) and electricity is expensive. A heat pump to go through the winter would be insanely expensive for most households. Is there any solution that could fix this issue?
- tuatoru 4y agoInsulation! Northern/Western Europe has a whole bunch of Ukrainian refugees. Why not solve two problems at once by putting them to work doing insulation retrofits?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danans 4y agoInsulation isn't that challenging. Houses eventually need to be upgraded and remodeled. That's usually a good time to insulate them better.
- 4y ago
- _hypx 4y agoThe next step is to use excess renewable energy to electrolyze water and make hydrogen. To get to the next step requires direct air capture of CO₂. We haven't solved that last problem yet. Also, it is not really necessary to go to that step in many cases. Steel can directly use hydrogen in production. Natural gas turbines can switch to hydrogen instead. So any kind of hydrocarbon quickly becomes a value-added cost that may only make sense if you need that particular hydrocarbon.
- marcosdumay 4y ago> Steel can directly use hydrogen in production. Well, yes, you can use hydrogen. But you will always have to use some carbon too.
- ncmncm 4y agoIn other words, steel is a long-term sink for carbon.
- NickNameNick 4y agoOnly if the infrastructure for producing the synthetic fuel is cheap enough to leave idle part of the time.
- ncmncm 4y agoFuel synthesis equipment will never be idle except when long-term storage is actually being drawn down. The output is too valuable for too many things. Everyone will massively overbuild generating capacity in order to keep their electrolysers busy at all times.
- stephen_g 4y agoHeat pumps are so much more efficient in many climates (and the tech is improving quickly for cold temperature air-source - newer model are reportedly much better than was available even five years ago) that it's better to go for electrification. That's even before the massive efficiency loss of producing gas from electricity. Burning gas also produces NOx emissions, which is something that would be much better to avoid, especially in and around houses. The air quality improvements to electrification are potentially massive for public health.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sbf501 4y agoWell, 1 out of 22,300 TWh is a start! Menlo park didn't light the world in a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu... EDIT: Misread power as energy.
- mjb 4y agoYou can't compare TW and TWh in that way (one is power, the other energy). With solar the way that TW translates to TWh is a little complicated, but it sure isn't 1:1 (probably closer to 1:2000).
- pooper 4y agoJust curious, did you get 2000 as in eight hours a day, five days a week? It just reminds me of the rough estimate of the number of hours worked in a year which I find funny to think about the sun going to work in an office for five days a week, eight hours a day. 8 * 5 * 50 = 2000 so the sun gets two weeks vacation a year :)
- 10u152 4y agoJust on this, depending on location there are "rules of thumb" based on hours of sunlight, cloud cover etc. Where I live the rule of thumb is 4. So 1 KW of panels will make around 4kWh a day, averaged over the year or about 1460 a year.
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoI think more accurately the sun puts in incredibly long hours, but isn't working at full productivity for a lot of it (maybe if it cut back to a normal 40 hour work week it would get more done).
- jewel 4y agoA single TW of solar would produce a TW for every hour that the sun is shining, so it could be 3,000 TWh for every TW installed. Obviously the exact value depends on the insolation.
- epistasis 4y agoIt's been entertaining to watch an industry that is completely unused to technology change start to encounter technologies with exponential change in performance (e.g. cost, for solar). So much of the industry is caught completely flat-footed, and projections and modeling are tweaked and changed until the projections for solar, wind, and storage, are often out of date and wrong by the time they are published. Utilities are used to planning with five year time frames, but they will often use estimates from publications that are years old, and the publication may have been under review for a year, in addition to data collection time. So it's not unusual for utilities to do planning with numbers that are 10 years off of where they should be. It takes private citizens to cajole utilities and Public Utilities Commissions to practice basic good decision making. There are two exceptions to the complete lack of innovation in the industry: Renewable Portfolio Standards that force utilities to change their production by force of law, and open markets in places like Texas where people can see how bad the decision making is from the old school and outcompete with their own generation sources. (and each of these states has had their own planning failures, both connected to improper governance at the PUC level, which is likely due to captured regulators.)
- vkou 4y agoNothing in life is exponential, but there are a lot of people who confuse the first half of a sigmoid curve for it.
- epistasis 4y agoOf course, but we are without a doubt experiencing exponential technology change. All models are approximations, and an exponential approximation is far better than whatever is going into EIA and IEA advice to policy makers. We have not yet hit the linear part of the sigmoid, and are not close. But the good modes out there take that sigmoid shape into account. (Also, why don't Singularity advocates know about sigmoids?)
- kelseyfrog 4y agoSince the early parts of sigmoid and exponential curves are indistinguishable, the singularity advocates opt for the more interesting of the two. The question people are most interested in "what's the saturation level?" of sigmoids has such a large prediction interval that it's next to useless to estimate from data.
- tomohawk 4y agoFor solar and other intermittent sources to be viable at scale, a continental long haul grid is needed, as well as a way to store power. Generally, you need 2x intermittent capacity to replace non-intermittent, as you need to be able to provide power, and store power at the same time.
- brianwawok 4y agoAC is a huge load for much of the US. Covering that with solar is a huge win even if you need something else for 10pm. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
- flavius29663 4y agoAnd not just AC, but the service economy runs during daytime for the most part.
- Wohlf 4y agoAC is a huge load now, with electrification heating will eclipse it. I can confirm this via my electric bill with a heat pump.
- missedthecue 4y agoNew AC designs seem to get about 1-2% more efficient every year, so we're making progress on both ends.
- megaman821 4y agoIt's funny people always forget this. There is a much bigger temperature differential to overcome to provide heating compared to cooling in most of the US. Burning natural gas for various forms of heat is probably the most energy intensive thing most houses do. Electricity is more efficient, but once heating is electrified, most residential electricity will be used to heat homes and water.
- dhc02 4y ago
- FabHK 4y agoThat is quite remarkable (if true), given that total world electricity consumption is around 3 TW on average. (ETA: one commenter adds that solar has an "average capacity factor" of around 20%, so that 1 TW deployed will provide about 0.2 TW on average. Still, very impressive.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
- anonu 4y agoElon musk made a point in a recent talk, the entire demand of the USA could be satisfied with a 100x100 square miles of solar panels. Thinking in those terms, you realize it's quite achievable. Edit - 100x100
- ncmncm 4y agoThere is a video debunking that: 10,000 square miles, to start with. But really, a fair bit more than that. Or would be, except we have wind and hydro. And even nukes and geothermal. It will honestly take one hell of a lot of panels, any way you count them. But that just hammers home how much we are still spending every day on coal, oil, and gas. We will spend less when most of our power comes from the panels, even with the capital cost of the panels figured in.
- guerrilla 4y agoElon Musk lies a lot, not sure why you didn't validate that before parroting it because it's definitely false.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoNot sure (it's been a long time) but I think that a figure like that (a square 200 miles on a side) arose long ago based on a constant insolation (so, spread around the world, not one location) and 100% capture(??). (For world electricity use only, based on usage at that time.)
- quickthrower2 4y agoEven if 100 by 100 is correct and it isn’t more that is an insane engineering project, and a lot of land. More than Lebanon, for example.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoThis might be only tangentially related, but every time someone darkens my doorstep selling solar, they fail to explain to me how I'm even going to break even with solar. I'm sure some of that might be Oncor, but I'm not interested in covering my roof with ugly panels AND paying more money in the long run.
- fmorel 4y agoI look at it the other way - I like having the panels on my roof. When I later add battery storage, I'll be able to keep the lights on during power outages. And maybe my purchasing them helps finance the industry a little bit so further improvements can be made.
- nineplay 4y agoI don't rely on door-to-door salesmen to give me detailed information about my energy consumption. There are plenty of calculator online, and reputable solar companies ( who do not sell door-to-door in my experience ) will be happy to help you understand.
- ncmncm 4y agoYour door-to-door salesman is charging 4x what you could pay somebody not on the take. Home Depot, likewise.
- _ea1k 4y agoUnfortunately the people going door to door aren't likely to be competent enough to do that. If its a good company, these are just qualifying leads and passing them back to sales staff. Hopefully those are better, and that's really your best option if you want to get deep into the details.
- greggeter 4y ago
- wyldfire 4y agoMaybe this is a stupid question but I wonder if there are any ecological concerns about redirecting terawatts of power from the photons hitting Earth into electricity. Of course, it's bound to be a big net win over burning hydrocarbons. But is there any drawback?
- skybrian 4y agoYes, whatever is under the solar panels gets less sunlight. There are even some companies starting to lay solar panels directly on the ground, which means it gets none at all. I don't think it's all that hard to take that into account, though; it's a land use concern. What was the land being used for before? Also, the terawatts of power generated will get converted to heat in developed areas where it's used, but that's true of any electricity use.
- ScottBurson 4y agoBut if the sunlight that produced that power had hit something else instead, it also would have been turned into heat. There's no net heating of the planet from solar power. (Of course, the distribution of heating can change.)
- dhc02 4y agoYes, and when electricity is used to do work, the vast, overwhelming majority of the energy used is turned into heat. So solar panels are moving heat, not sending it into a black hole somewhere.
- ScottBurson 4y agoThat was my point.
- rootusrootus 4y agoRecall that PV panels are black. They get quite hot, almost certainly hotter than plain dirt would if uncovered. Plenty hot enough that you can't touch them for more than a moment.
- Iwan-Zotow 4y agoAnd what to do at night? Fornicate?
- 8note 4y agoStill burn some gas? That's still a big reduction in gas burnt
- 01100011 4y agoFortunately there are a lot of options for grid storage and most of them don't need lithium which will be in short supply for the next few years.
- CountSessine 4y agoSuch as? Gravity is a terrible way to store energy, and everything else seems to be 20 years out.
- adrianN 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas for example. Iron-air batteries or redox-flow batteries also look very promising.
- CountSessine 4y agoThis is the “20 years out” that I mentioned. In the meantime, it’s lithium.
- adrianN 4y agoPower to gas is available today, we just need to build the electrolyzers. Several MW worth are already operating in Germany for R&D purposes.
- countvonbalzac 4y ago
- nr2x 4y agoIt’s still remarkable to me none of the big oil companies are going hard into renewables. It’s like they are either accepting their decline or are in denial.
- drexlspivey 4y agoWhat decline? Hydrocarbon demand is going up over time while the supply is going down due to underinvestment.
- lstodd 4y ago> none of the big oil companies are going hard into renewables Citation, please. Because afaik it's the other way around. They're not 'oil' companies, they're energy companies. As long as something other than 'oil' gets more interesting they'll do it.
- interpenetrate 4y agoThey're company companies, meaning that their goal is to make profit, not do something that's "interesting." You can't take Apple seriously when its spokespeople explain the logic that drives its production. It's a load of horseshit. You can't take BP seriously when they says that it's an "energy company" and you can't take Apple seriously when they says that it's a "tech company." European oil majors invest in "renewables," American oil majors basically do not at all (unless you count carbon sequestration for the purpose of further oil extraction as "renewable"). Here's a source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhart/2021/03/09/oil-giants-bet-big-on-expected-2-trillion-carbon-capture-market/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhart/2021/03/09/oil-gian... This difference in strategy stems from the difference in economic opportunity between the two imperialist spheres.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf the oil companies were acting in the best interests of the shareholders, they would be all-in on renewables. But US oil companies act in the interest of corporate officers, who are all close to retirement.
- fmajid 4y agoIt would be wonderful if it came to be but I find that hard to believe. The UK peak electricity consumption is around 40GW, so that would be enough to supply 1.2B people at UK standards of living. In just 6 years the entire world’s electricity needs would be met. Unless they count hydrogen and synthetic fuel generation.
- gibolt 4y agoSolar is meant to handle peak loads, but spread out over the full day and night. Its worst case peak winter output will need to exceed usage. The future will mean energy abundance during most of the year. An S-curve of cost decline and deployments means even 1TW could be a low estimate
- redisman 4y agoSolar is certainly not a silver bullet. Putting the same panel in Arizona or Norway will yield a wildly different RoI
- gibolt 4y agoHowever, electricity is easily transmitted, especially compared to oil pipelines. Northern Africa is having a massive solar boon right now, with lines delivering across Europe.
- ncmncm 4y agoNot so much as you would expect. Solar panels have got cheap enough that buying more of them to use locally is cheaper than buying the transmission line. The smart money would be buying ammonia synthesis equipment to site in Africa, instead, to sell to Finland and wherever the wind has let up.
- adrianN 4y agoDependence on foreign nations for your energy needs is currently not very in vogue.
- kvetching 4y agoThis stupidity is causing our civilization to collapse. Don't ignore what works now such as natural gas, nuclear, clean coal. It's still 8 years till 2030. Investment in these have collapsed, and now we are short on resources. https://www.wsj.com/articles/electricity-shortage-warnings-grow-across-u-s-11652002380 https://www.wsj.com/articles/electricity-shortage-warnings-g...
- epistasis 4y agoClean coal? Never worked. Nuclear is a failure as an entire industry, just nowhere near enough competence to even build anymore. Gas still emits carbon, even if you ignore the leaked methane. These approaches have all proven themselves to be dead tech. There is no smart money in them, only saps.
- causality0 4y agoIndustrial-level deployments have dropped precipitously in price but personal-scale ones have not. It still takes two decades for home solar to pay for itself. Portable panels for camping are about the same price they were five years ago.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf you buy from Home Depot or any of the hawkers putting flyers in your mail, payback time is long. But they charge 4x the FOB price for a pallet-load.
- epistasis 4y agoTaking two decades to pay for itself depends entirely on the rate structure of the utility and the prices of the installer. Prices in the US are heavily inflated because rate regulations change dramatízale year to year, which means that the only installers that survive tend to be the ones that can dynamically expand into a market before the utility closes the market again. Which means that a huge fraction of US solar costs are actually customer acquisition costs, marketing and advertising and boots on the ground doing the hard sell to consumers. Where I live, even with super expensive installation, solar pays for itself in five years. When you say "pays for itself" does that include the cost of interest and the time value of money? If so, then you can finance the installation and still come out ahead. Even with the high price of residential solar, it's still pretty cheap compared to the cost of new transmission and distribution infrastructure, which is what utility-scale solar also requires. And utility scale solar is the cheapest energy out there. So we should find ways to make the US solar industry more efficient and cost effective for consumers, because pairing residential solar with batteries (for example in an EV) is a very cost effective future.
- rapsey 4y agoIt actually costs double to install a solar roof in the US than in the EU. It takes about 5-8 years for the roof to pay for itself over here (of course depending on your location).
- stephen_g 4y agoDepends where you are. In Australia it's pretty cheap - I had 6.6kW installed for about US$4000 and it should pay off in about seven years. Would have been five or six but the feed in tariff went down - although with the massive increase in the price of coal and gas, the tariff should increase again, given the wholesale electricity cost is jumping up.
- robomartin 4y agoHaving done the numbers to understand solar (and having designed and built a 13 kW array myself) the hubris exhibited in these conversations about solar continues to perplex me. There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts. The reality of solar is very different from the dream of solar. The simplest calculations clearly show this. In order to match the power output of a nuclear power plant you need to build a photovoltaic solar installation of at least seven times the peak power output. In other words, if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak. And it gets worse, much worse, from there. Why doesn't anyone ever bother to do the math before they become blind champions of technologies they clearly do not understand at a technological level? I understand the emotional connection with wanting to be "clean". Yet, at some point, you have to connect the dream with reality through numbers. Numbers of this type do not lie. The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf you do the math without your thumb on the scale you get a different answer. Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar. If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most. Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they were made to spend on their 0W nuke plant.
- robomartin 4y ago> Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar Nope. Not true. The fact that contractors are raping people doesn't mean that's the cost. The system I installed for about $30K was quoted at $100K. If people pay stupid money for solar that's their problem. > If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most. Not sure where that number comes from. Oh, wait, that's 1/7 th. Ah, you are using my 7x figure to attack my argument? Show me the math that compares any solar system to a nuclear power generator. See, the fact that you used this 14% figure confirmed my suspicion. You really don't know what you are talking about. For all I know you have the mathematical skills to do the numbers, you just haven't taken the time to do it and, as a result, are operating under ideas that can only be described as part of a cult rather than science and engineering. > Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they spend on their 0W nuke plant. By that logic aircraft should not have been developed, ever. If a few failures means a technology is to be avoided most of what we enjoy today would not exist. You are intentionally avoiding the mathematical realities of solar by using a project that was grotesquely mismanaged to sidestep reality. Google says there are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. One or two failed projects due to abject incompetence clearly isn't an argument at all in support of anything other than, don't hire idiots. Do you even know the answer? If I asked you to describe top level requirements for a photovoltaic array that would be the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant. What would you say? Do you have any idea at all? Can you describe the calculations? Probably not. Most people don't. They like to argue, sometimes passionately, and yet few actually know what they are talking about. So what's your answer? The photovoltaic equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant is calculated as follows: ... I'll wait.
- choeger 4y agoBack-of-the-envelope calculation regarding the market size: World primary energy consumption is well below (and will remain below for a while) 200PWh, if I am not mistaken. Assuming a lifespan of 30 years, this quantity would allow for 30TW of world-wide installed peak power. Assuming further an average utilization of 1000h/a, we end up with about 15% of the world energy needs, assuming a 1:1 electrification with solar power. So by this calculation, there's maybe room for 3-4TW, which this growth curve would reach around 2036. By 2040 solar energy would be abundant world-wide. Of course there will be other limits much earlier and the growth might flatten much earlier, but I think I wouldn't hold stock of solar panel manufacturers after 2028 or so.
- jl6 4y agoSufficiently cheap solar could replace all primary energy sources (e.g. through storage and fuel synthesis), and total global energy consumption may also increase dramatically if the price is right. So a solar manufacturer that continues to find ways to cut costs could remain a good investment for a long time to come.