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Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings, since the ratio of roof to living space is far too low. Batteries would also be impractical to install in

Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings, since the ratio of roof to living space is far too low. Batteries would also be impractical to install in apartments, where space is at a premium. One of the tradeoffs to building dense is that it makes it harder to decentralize the grid.

nyokodo 4y ago
> Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings Solar windows might help there: https://www.solarwindow.com/ https://www.solarwindow.com/
midoridensha 4y ago
>One of the tradeoffs to building dense is that it makes it harder to decentralize the grid. The other side of that is that with dense living, people need dramatically less energy to begin with. Less energy for heating and cooling, and far less energy to transportation if they live close to wherever they go and can just walk there.
hedora 4y ago
Community net metering solves this problem. It's not available in CA, but is in other states The apartment dwellers just buy some percentage of a solar farm, then the power company pretends that percentage of the farm's production came from the apartment's roof. Denser housing uses much less energy, so it takes much less solar per person to offset the apartment's power usage. Similarly, room can be made for batteries elsewhere, and they can be packed extremely tightly wherever they are installed. (This only works for time shifting, not individual home backup.)
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Heating and cooling are the primary energy use and decrease faster than roof area increases for low rise apartments. Average apartment size is about 80m^2 so in a 3 story building that's about 30m^2 each or roughly 5kWh/day. 200W doesn't allow you to be wasteful, but it's plenty for a 1-2 bedroom apartment. Hybrid cells with slightly better efficiency and low light tolerance would get you to 10kWh/d Tokyo is around 7000 people per km^2. A 2 bedroom apartment can happily house two or three people, so with a reasonable amount of roof area per apartment you have 80-90% of your area available for not-housing. High density just means not dedicating a freestanding house worth of land area per resident to force them into cars, it doesn't need to mean highrise. Even with manila levels of density you can still get lighting, climate control (if well insulated), a washing machine, a few entertainment devices at 10-20W and basic cooking (nothing for the ground level commercial or infrastructure though) with about half your area left for not-housing. So that's some level of semi-decentralisation even in the worst case. Mid-winter in high latitudes you might struggle without long term storage, but it's not unsolvable. Batteries take up approximately 0 space. If the better part of a month's worth of energy can fit in a car it's fine.

nyokodo 4y ago

> Solar panels also cannot support apartment buildings Solar windows might help there: https://www.solarwindow.com/ https://www.solarwindow.com/

midoridensha 4y ago

>One of the tradeoffs to building dense is that it makes it harder to decentralize the grid. The other side of that is that with dense living, people need dramatically less energy to begin with. Less energy for heating and cooling, and far less energy to transportation if they live close to wherever they go and can just walk there.

hedora 4y ago

Community net metering solves this problem. It's not available in CA, but is in other states The apartment dwellers just buy some percentage of a solar farm, then the power company pretends that percentage of the farm's production came from the apartment's roof. Denser housing uses much less energy, so it takes much less solar per person to offset the apartment's power usage. Similarly, room can be made for batteries elsewhere, and they can be packed extremely tightly wherever they are installed. (This only works for time shifting, not individual home backup.)

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Heating and cooling are the primary energy use and decrease faster than roof area increases for low rise apartments. Average apartment size is about 80m^2 so in a 3 story building that's about 30m^2 each or roughly 5kWh/day. 200W doesn't allow you to be wasteful, but it's plenty for a 1-2 bedroom apartment. Hybrid cells with slightly better efficiency and low light tolerance would get you to 10kWh/d Tokyo is around 7000 people per km^2. A 2 bedroom apartment can happily house two or three people, so with a reasonable amount of roof area per apartment you have 80-90% of your area available for not-housing. High density just means not dedicating a freestanding house worth of land area per resident to force them into cars, it doesn't need to mean highrise. Even with manila levels of density you can still get lighting, climate control (if well insulated), a washing machine, a few entertainment devices at 10-20W and basic cooking (nothing for the ground level commercial or infrastructure though) with about half your area left for not-housing. So that's some level of semi-decentralisation even in the worst case. Mid-winter in high latitudes you might struggle without long term storage, but it's not unsolvable. Batteries take up approximately 0 space. If the better part of a month's worth of energy can fit in a car it's fine.