5 ms·

Many don't know this but the most important thing to know about solar is that it is so far the only method of direct power generation that exists. Nuclear and v

by jmyeet 4y ago

Many don't know this but the most important thing to know about solar is that it is so far the only method of direct power generation that exists. Nuclear and various fossil fuels create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. This adds cost and complexity that you can never get away from. But solar by virtue of being direct avoids all of this so has a lower bound in cost that other methods of power generation will find it hard to compete with. Solar cells can be small so solar power is highly flexible. Plus it has no moving parts (other than sometimes solar cells are moved slowly to face the Sun as it moves through the sky) so it's upper bound for reliability is hard to beat. I actually think solar is and will be the most important method of power generation in the coming centuries that will culminate in space-based solar power collectors. So solar has the potential to be extraordinarily cheap, reliable and require no expensive infrastructure like power lines. Creating methanol is essentially a way of storing excess energy so this could be a real game-changer for developing nations that lack such infrastructure.

jdironman 4y ago
And even more so if the plants which produce solar products use solar power to offset. I wonder if they do that or not. I'm guessing it's not quiet that simple and distributors of the individual components vary in their methods.
itsthecourier 4y ago
Dyson sphere style
elzbardico 4y ago
Solar power is intermittent. This make it far more expensive for practical, real world applications in large scale. Nuclear is the only thing that can realistically substitute fossil fuels. Solar is at best a niche due to the storage needs.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That is of course wholly false. It is why solar farms are going up all over the world, counted in thousands, while nukes are not. Storage is cheap. We have myriad alternatives, according to local requirements. Efficiency used to be a worry, but solar has got so cheap, you just add panels to make up the difference.
  - mcronce 4y ago
    > Storage is cheap. And yet it's solar being built all over the world, not storage.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Storage is also being built. But storage will lag in volume until intermittent sources like solar produces enough in any given region that there are significant periods of excess that aren't better to deal with by bringing other plants offline.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Right, it would be stupid to spend big on storage that cannot be charged up from renewables that exist. First you build enough renewables, to displace fossil fuel (and opex), then build storage when you cannot displace much fossil fuel, any more. All this is easy for an operator to figure out, daily: add solar, fuel cost falls in exact proportion. When you have to turn off enough banks of panels enough of the time, you start building stuff to absorb that energy for later. But not until building more panels cuts your fuel cost less than building storage cuts your night-time fuel cost. (Wind input makes this calculation less deterministic.)
        vidarh 4y ago
        Exactly. There is some benefit to building some storage before then to reduce the need for peaker plants, and that is largely what happens today when storage gets built. E.g. Tesla's battery project in Australia a few years back for example.
- nothis 4y ago
  Re-check your sources. A lot of pro-nuclear material out there is pure advertising from nuclear lobbies. Nuclear is a hugely expensive and high-maintenance way of generating energy. There's risks that don't show up in neat, averaged numbers, think Russia shelling a nuclear plant in 2022, that was on none of the yay-nuclear bingo cards.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    GP poster is correct. Instead of talking about propaganda, you should go check the sources you're telling other people to check. South Korean energy does cost circles around subsidized wind and solar, and doesn't need ridiculous battery infrastructure. Gen-3 PWR nuclear is, in reality, by far the cheapest form of power on Earth, and you'll never find any hard evidence from respectable sources saying otherwise. (Probably that's why you're poisoning the water with claims of lobbies and bingo cards.) . > There's risks that don't show up in neat, averaged numbers No, there aren't. Nuclear has killed fewer people all of in history than any other form of power generation in its worst month. Almost no industry in human history, power generating or otherwise, has a human death safety record anywhere near as good as nuclear power's. (I can't think of a single specific counter-example. Can you?) The worst nuclear disaster in history, Kyshtym, which most people have never even heard of, didn't kill as many people as a bad bus accident. Please bring hard evidence with your next set of claims. No, I don't mean estimates from the 80s by non-doctors that never panned out. . > think Russia shelling a nuclear plant in 2022 Zero deaths. You wouldn't expect that from other forms of power plant being shelled. Your examples work against you. There's a reason why when we talk about deaths from other forms of power we talk about actual deaths, but when we talk about deaths from nuclear power, we talk about risk that hasn't occurred and what might maybe happen someday If you look at the numbers, and say "yes, but in my imagination," then you're doing the wrong thing You say "check your sources" but you haven't actually done that yourself, yet You talk about "advertising from nuclear lobbies" but nuclear fans' sources tend to be the government
Gravityloss 4y ago
Well, hydro or wind power don't have their own heat engine (the planet of course does stuff with sunlight that ultimately moves the turbine blades, yes)
credit_guy 4y ago
> Nuclear and various fossil fuels create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. This adds cost and complexity that you can never get away from. That part is almost negligible. A General Electric LM6000 turbine costs about $20 million and generates about 50 MW of electricity. That translates into $400 MM per GW. Solar comes to about the same price, but it has a capacity factor of only 30%, vs 98% for the GE LM6000 turbine.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  98% not counting periodic overhaul. Then, 80-90%. But you have to add the cost of the heat source. When that is a nuke, cost balloons out of sight. Geothermal is better, but drilling is still expensive; that might come down if microwave drills work out. But the cost of periodic steam turbine overhauls will be hard to bring down to match dusting off PV panels. Pressurized steam is just very corrosive stuff. That is why the mirror-array solar projects all failed. Steering thousand of mirrors, keeping them clean, and then driving a steam turbine just cannot match a static array of PV panels. The technology might have a place for supplying process heat, but it will be hard to match PV-powered fuel synthesis for cost and convenience.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    > 98% not counting periodic overhaul. the reason for the null hypothesis is that if you had run one, you'd realize that solar has a 20 year periodic replacement, as compared to nuclear's 80 year periodic maintenance, so this argument (like all arguments) is against solar . > When that is a nuke, cost balloons out of sight. Not when compared to literally any other power source But if you hold it up in isolation, yeah, sure, it's expensive. Once every 50 years because of bad laws, you have to go in there and pay about a quarter what the plant was worth. And it'd still be cheaper if you had to do it every ten years, plus more reliable, and it wouldn't waste all the copper and rare earths, and it wouldn't leave you with China as the new Middle East. . > But the cost of periodic steam turbine overhauls will be hard to bring down to match dusting off PV panels. You don't dust PV panels off. That's daily cleaning. Maintenance for PV panels is replacing them every 12-23 years depending on what brand you bought. An honest discussion would really help. . > That is why the mirror-array solar projects all failed. No it's not. Also, the mirror-array solar projects do better than the PV ones, if you take the time to look it up. The reason the mirror-array solar projects failed is, like the PV projects, they bought into the myth of storage. . > but it will be hard to match PV-powered fuel synthesis for cost and convenience. This is the only good reason to use PV, and it's because the end product that's desired is a chemical battery Batteries are the only thing PV can fill, and gasoline is the only kind of battery anyone actually wants to buy In the meantime, the idea of using PV for this is absolutely absurd. It's 1/5 the price to do it on nuclear, and you know, it turns out that people are sensitive to the price of gasoline. If you do an actual comparison with actual numbers where all the solutions are checked for every claim, instead of just the one you want to make look a certain way, suddenly you realize why nobody's building this despite that all the parts are cheap and unregulated, and despite that the market demand is vast and well established. If this was true, instead of posting about it, you should be building a proof of concept, then applying for a bank loan, so that you can get rich saving the planet. Cheap off the shelf parts don't do world-saving things, in general, or else someone would have already done it. If you believe that you can do something the world's scientists and engineers are desperately struggling to do using stuff you can buy at WalMart, there's a very solid probability that you're missing some key pieces in the evaluation, and should look up one of the publicly available studies.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> Nuclear ... create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. One of my greatest disappointments as a kid was learning this. I'd thought nuclear power somehow got the power of the atom directly to a wire/grid.
- sailingparrot 4y ago
  Maybe RTGs [1] that are used on some spacecraft will reappoint you. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    Love the comment and the use of the word “reappoint”. Never thought of the root of the word “disappoint” prior
    - 8jef 4y ago
      +1
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  Aneutronic nuclear fusion with direct energy conversion is the dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  the kid in you wants to hear "it's basically a steamboat"
  - AvocadoPanic 4y ago
    Now I hope this is the dystopia with nuclear paddle-wheel steamboats.
perihelions 4y ago
These would also count as "direct" power generation, I think (how should it be defined?). None of them work at scale, yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
mcronce 4y ago
> reliable This is not usually a word that one uses to describe something that works when it wants to, as opposed to things that work when you want them to
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
> Nuclear and various fossil fuels create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. This adds cost and complexity that you can never get away from. Back here in reality, nuclear is much cheaper than solar, once you ignore the subsidies and the US-specific legal overhead More importantly, it's base load, meaning you don't need the batteries that are riotously more expensive than water boilers . > I actually think solar is and will be the most important method of power generation in the coming centuries Wind and solar are older than the grid, and have never been able to contribute Energiewende failed Humanity has no realistic non-nuclear future, and people should be required to look at the economic numbers before discussing this . > that will culminate in space-based solar power collectors. Found the person who grew up on SimCity "Boiling water adds too much complexity so let's build an infrastructure in orbit" . > Creating methanol is essentially a way of storing excess energy One of many. There are much better ones. We generally don't use methanol as a chemical battery, even though it can be, because we have such radically better options. Methanol is almost solely consumed as a fuel or as an intermediate product from fuels Besides, the great thing about base load is that when you have it, you don't need to store excess energy. You just create the amount you need You're solving problems that don't need to exist, while calling the normal way "too complicated"

by jmyeet 4y ago

jdironman 4y ago

And even more so if the plants which produce solar products use solar power to offset. I wonder if they do that or not. I'm guessing it's not quiet that simple and distributors of the individual components vary in their methods.

itsthecourier 4y ago

Dyson sphere style

elzbardico 4y ago

Solar power is intermittent. This make it far more expensive for practical, real world applications in large scale. Nuclear is the only thing that can realistically substitute fossil fuels. Solar is at best a niche due to the storage needs.

ncmncm 4y ago
That is of course wholly false. It is why solar farms are going up all over the world, counted in thousands, while nukes are not. Storage is cheap. We have myriad alternatives, according to local requirements. Efficiency used to be a worry, but solar has got so cheap, you just add panels to make up the difference.
- mcronce 4y ago
  > Storage is cheap. And yet it's solar being built all over the world, not storage.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Storage is also being built. But storage will lag in volume until intermittent sources like solar produces enough in any given region that there are significant periods of excess that aren't better to deal with by bringing other plants offline.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Right, it would be stupid to spend big on storage that cannot be charged up from renewables that exist. First you build enough renewables, to displace fossil fuel (and opex), then build storage when you cannot displace much fossil fuel, any more. All this is easy for an operator to figure out, daily: add solar, fuel cost falls in exact proportion. When you have to turn off enough banks of panels enough of the time, you start building stuff to absorb that energy for later. But not until building more panels cuts your fuel cost less than building storage cuts your night-time fuel cost. (Wind input makes this calculation less deterministic.)
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Exactly. There is some benefit to building some storage before then to reduce the need for peaker plants, and that is largely what happens today when storage gets built. E.g. Tesla's battery project in Australia a few years back for example.
nothis 4y ago
Re-check your sources. A lot of pro-nuclear material out there is pure advertising from nuclear lobbies. Nuclear is a hugely expensive and high-maintenance way of generating energy. There's risks that don't show up in neat, averaged numbers, think Russia shelling a nuclear plant in 2022, that was on none of the yay-nuclear bingo cards.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  GP poster is correct. Instead of talking about propaganda, you should go check the sources you're telling other people to check. South Korean energy does cost circles around subsidized wind and solar, and doesn't need ridiculous battery infrastructure. Gen-3 PWR nuclear is, in reality, by far the cheapest form of power on Earth, and you'll never find any hard evidence from respectable sources saying otherwise. (Probably that's why you're poisoning the water with claims of lobbies and bingo cards.) . > There's risks that don't show up in neat, averaged numbers No, there aren't. Nuclear has killed fewer people all of in history than any other form of power generation in its worst month. Almost no industry in human history, power generating or otherwise, has a human death safety record anywhere near as good as nuclear power's. (I can't think of a single specific counter-example. Can you?) The worst nuclear disaster in history, Kyshtym, which most people have never even heard of, didn't kill as many people as a bad bus accident. Please bring hard evidence with your next set of claims. No, I don't mean estimates from the 80s by non-doctors that never panned out. . > think Russia shelling a nuclear plant in 2022 Zero deaths. You wouldn't expect that from other forms of power plant being shelled. Your examples work against you. There's a reason why when we talk about deaths from other forms of power we talk about actual deaths, but when we talk about deaths from nuclear power, we talk about risk that hasn't occurred and what might maybe happen someday If you look at the numbers, and say "yes, but in my imagination," then you're doing the wrong thing You say "check your sources" but you haven't actually done that yourself, yet You talk about "advertising from nuclear lobbies" but nuclear fans' sources tend to be the government

Gravityloss 4y ago

Well, hydro or wind power don't have their own heat engine (the planet of course does stuff with sunlight that ultimately moves the turbine blades, yes)

credit_guy 4y ago

> Nuclear and various fossil fuels create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. This adds cost and complexity that you can never get away from. That part is almost negligible. A General Electric LM6000 turbine costs about $20 million and generates about 50 MW of electricity. That translates into $400 MM per GW. Solar comes to about the same price, but it has a capacity factor of only 30%, vs 98% for the GE LM6000 turbine.

ncmncm 4y ago
98% not counting periodic overhaul. Then, 80-90%. But you have to add the cost of the heat source. When that is a nuke, cost balloons out of sight. Geothermal is better, but drilling is still expensive; that might come down if microwave drills work out. But the cost of periodic steam turbine overhauls will be hard to bring down to match dusting off PV panels. Pressurized steam is just very corrosive stuff. That is why the mirror-array solar projects all failed. Steering thousand of mirrors, keeping them clean, and then driving a steam turbine just cannot match a static array of PV panels. The technology might have a place for supplying process heat, but it will be hard to match PV-powered fuel synthesis for cost and convenience.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > 98% not counting periodic overhaul. the reason for the null hypothesis is that if you had run one, you'd realize that solar has a 20 year periodic replacement, as compared to nuclear's 80 year periodic maintenance, so this argument (like all arguments) is against solar . > When that is a nuke, cost balloons out of sight. Not when compared to literally any other power source But if you hold it up in isolation, yeah, sure, it's expensive. Once every 50 years because of bad laws, you have to go in there and pay about a quarter what the plant was worth. And it'd still be cheaper if you had to do it every ten years, plus more reliable, and it wouldn't waste all the copper and rare earths, and it wouldn't leave you with China as the new Middle East. . > But the cost of periodic steam turbine overhauls will be hard to bring down to match dusting off PV panels. You don't dust PV panels off. That's daily cleaning. Maintenance for PV panels is replacing them every 12-23 years depending on what brand you bought. An honest discussion would really help. . > That is why the mirror-array solar projects all failed. No it's not. Also, the mirror-array solar projects do better than the PV ones, if you take the time to look it up. The reason the mirror-array solar projects failed is, like the PV projects, they bought into the myth of storage. . > but it will be hard to match PV-powered fuel synthesis for cost and convenience. This is the only good reason to use PV, and it's because the end product that's desired is a chemical battery Batteries are the only thing PV can fill, and gasoline is the only kind of battery anyone actually wants to buy In the meantime, the idea of using PV for this is absolutely absurd. It's 1/5 the price to do it on nuclear, and you know, it turns out that people are sensitive to the price of gasoline. If you do an actual comparison with actual numbers where all the solutions are checked for every claim, instead of just the one you want to make look a certain way, suddenly you realize why nobody's building this despite that all the parts are cheap and unregulated, and despite that the market demand is vast and well established. If this was true, instead of posting about it, you should be building a proof of concept, then applying for a bank loan, so that you can get rich saving the planet. Cheap off the shelf parts don't do world-saving things, in general, or else someone would have already done it. If you believe that you can do something the world's scientists and engineers are desperately struggling to do using stuff you can buy at WalMart, there's a very solid probability that you're missing some key pieces in the evaluation, and should look up one of the publicly available studies.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> Nuclear ... create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. One of my greatest disappointments as a kid was learning this. I'd thought nuclear power somehow got the power of the atom directly to a wire/grid.

sailingparrot 4y ago
Maybe RTGs [1] that are used on some spacecraft will reappoint you. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Love the comment and the use of the word “reappoint”. Never thought of the root of the word “disappoint” prior
  - 8jef 4y ago
    +1
was_a_dev 4y ago
Aneutronic nuclear fusion with direct energy conversion is the dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
the kid in you wants to hear "it's basically a steamboat"
- AvocadoPanic 4y ago
  Now I hope this is the dystopia with nuclear paddle-wheel steamboats.

perihelions 4y ago

These would also count as "direct" power generation, I think (how should it be defined?). None of them work at scale, yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion

mcronce 4y ago

> reliable This is not usually a word that one uses to describe something that works when it wants to, as opposed to things that work when you want them to

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

> Nuclear and various fossil fuels create heat that boils water to generate steam that turns a turbine to generate power. This adds cost and complexity that you can never get away from. Back here in reality, nuclear is much cheaper than solar, once you ignore the subsidies and the US-specific legal overhead More importantly, it's base load, meaning you don't need the batteries that are riotously more expensive than water boilers . > I actually think solar is and will be the most important method of power generation in the coming centuries Wind and solar are older than the grid, and have never been able to contribute Energiewende failed Humanity has no realistic non-nuclear future, and people should be required to look at the economic numbers before discussing this . > that will culminate in space-based solar power collectors. Found the person who grew up on SimCity "Boiling water adds too much complexity so let's build an infrastructure in orbit" . > Creating methanol is essentially a way of storing excess energy One of many. There are much better ones. We generally don't use methanol as a chemical battery, even though it can be, because we have such radically better options. Methanol is almost solely consumed as a fuel or as an intermediate product from fuels Besides, the great thing about base load is that when you have it, you don't need to store excess energy. You just create the amount you need You're solving problems that don't need to exist, while calling the normal way "too complicated"