7 ms·

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual elect

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn't be surprised if we could run our houses and light industry for 6 months a year purely on solar panels if we put them on every roof top in the country. Then you look at wind: we have a huge potential for wind energy especially off-shore (and in our big lakes). Like most of the EU the main problem is heating in winter - that requires a reduction in energy usage through insulation and heat-pumps combined with energy import from countries which have high potential for solar and wind (North Africa has huge potential here).

pixl97 4y ago
I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    We're getting to the point where wind > hydrogen > combustion will be cheap enough to cover that kind of swing. We're going to be connecting electric systems over a huge landmass which will resolve much of the non-seasonal swings.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel. What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
    - Mvandenbergh 4y ago
      Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all. If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        "Extremely" is really not a good way to describe it. Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power. AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society. Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    I think industries that are overwhelmingly dependent on energy often are like that now. Energy prices vary throughout the day and some industries (aluminum?) are very price sensitive.
- eloff 4y ago
  Yes. Quite easily, the materials are common. They require energy to process and ship, but that does not have to come from fossil fuels. I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century. Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).
    - d883kd8 4y ago
      Once we have mostly decarbonized there are many techniques for capturing carbon if you have enough energy
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        Perhaps, though we would need to do that long before the turn of the century. People just don't want to believe how little time there is left to stop catastrophic global warming.
    - mlindner 4y ago
      All the trends I've read recently put us to going to no higher than 3 degrees of warming. The trends that put us toward over 3 degrees of warming were made around the time period of ~2010 when the trends were much worse than they turned out to be over the 2010s. 3 degrees is very bad, but it's quite survivable. We can of course always do better. But right now I'm quite happy with the direction things are going and the current trends but still push for trying to do more where we can.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Most economies are aiming for net zero by 2050. A goal, which it is now clear, that would have been absolutely trivial to meet while making a solid profit on the deal, if we'd just started earlier, like when the problem became widely known four decades ago. But we didn't. So we can probably still do it, and we can probably still come out richer, but some people are still trying to slow it down so they can profit from the short term chaos and impoverishing and risking our lives to do so.
- geysersam 4y ago
  We have to. The alternative is destroying the earth even more. And overall, the lifetime environmental impact of solar panels is much lower than producing the same energy using fossile fuels.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    There is also the option of winding down energy consumption - we produce so much useless crap for no particular reason anyway.
    - harimau777 4y ago
      I think that would need to go hand in hand with social change to allow people greater quality of life outside of consumerism (e.g. greater economic stability, autonomy, home ownership, access to education, etc.). Right now it seems that the social contract is "give up your autonomy and stability to capitalism and in return you get to consume lots of stuff". If we remove the "consume lots of stuff" part of the equation, then I doubt people would be happy with the "give up your autonomy and stability" part.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Energy efficiency is skyrocketing though. My house uses 25% the energy it would with if we installed 20 year old appliances (even ignoring improvements to insulation).
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Yes you're absolutely right
pstrateman 4y ago
You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  That's true, and it's why other sources of energy are useful still, such as wind and nuclear and hydro. But I also think we'll never get to the point that everyone has solar installed. There are plenty of situations where it doesn't make sense, such as properties with lots of taller trees around short buildings. Also, generating 120% generally doesn't make sense because the payout from the electric company for the other 20% is pitiful. A battery makes sense for a lot of people for a few reasons, too, so the power company doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do all of that, either. We did it mainly for relief from power outages, but it also works well for places with prices that change by time of day.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Solar is so damn cheap it almost makes sense to set up supplemental systems even if you only get like 10% of the power rated on the panel. Panels are like $1 per nominal watt
- thelastgallon 4y ago
  A comment like this comes up in every discussion of renewables and needs to die. We don't need separate stationery storage, enormous storage capacity will be free as car batteries. EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030 [1]. By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars anyways. It is decentralized, no single point of failure. This is the sweetest kind of energy demand, can charge whenever electricity prices are negative or zero. Cars are parked nearly all the time, grid adaptations will evolve demand management. Cars will supply power back to the grid at its highest prices, providing a source of income for EV owners. [1] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-ZEV-Dashboard-Sep-2022.pdf https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-Z...
ericpauley 4y ago
> except heating How much of an impact did this actually make, though, since heating was probably the majority of your emissions to begin with? Solar may be sexy, but depending on your heat source you possibly could have done better by installing a heat pump on grid power.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Really depends on the insulation if you're in Western Europe close to the sea (making the winters less harsh). I live in a flat and the whole complex has been upgraded with modern insulation and modern windows about five years ago. I turn on the heat on a few days when I feel exceptionally cold, otherwise I don't and it still maintains 18-19° (being chubby helps, that's my comfort temperature). It's not because my neighbors are doing the heating for me -- I've talked to them, and they barely ever turn it up, either. Granted, that would change somewhat if we get a super harsh winter here, but otherwise: I consume much more electrical power than heating.

pixl97 4y ago

I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  We're getting to the point where wind > hydrogen > combustion will be cheap enough to cover that kind of swing. We're going to be connecting electric systems over a huge landmass which will resolve much of the non-seasonal swings.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel. What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
  - Mvandenbergh 4y ago
    Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all. If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      "Extremely" is really not a good way to describe it. Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power. AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society. Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  I think industries that are overwhelmingly dependent on energy often are like that now. Energy prices vary throughout the day and some industries (aluminum?) are very price sensitive.
eloff 4y ago
Yes. Quite easily, the materials are common. They require energy to process and ship, but that does not have to come from fossil fuels. I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century. Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).
  - d883kd8 4y ago
    Once we have mostly decarbonized there are many techniques for capturing carbon if you have enough energy
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Perhaps, though we would need to do that long before the turn of the century. People just don't want to believe how little time there is left to stop catastrophic global warming.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    All the trends I've read recently put us to going to no higher than 3 degrees of warming. The trends that put us toward over 3 degrees of warming were made around the time period of ~2010 when the trends were much worse than they turned out to be over the 2010s. 3 degrees is very bad, but it's quite survivable. We can of course always do better. But right now I'm quite happy with the direction things are going and the current trends but still push for trying to do more where we can.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Most economies are aiming for net zero by 2050. A goal, which it is now clear, that would have been absolutely trivial to meet while making a solid profit on the deal, if we'd just started earlier, like when the problem became widely known four decades ago. But we didn't. So we can probably still do it, and we can probably still come out richer, but some people are still trying to slow it down so they can profit from the short term chaos and impoverishing and risking our lives to do so.
geysersam 4y ago
We have to. The alternative is destroying the earth even more. And overall, the lifetime environmental impact of solar panels is much lower than producing the same energy using fossile fuels.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  There is also the option of winding down energy consumption - we produce so much useless crap for no particular reason anyway.
  - harimau777 4y ago
    I think that would need to go hand in hand with social change to allow people greater quality of life outside of consumerism (e.g. greater economic stability, autonomy, home ownership, access to education, etc.). Right now it seems that the social contract is "give up your autonomy and stability to capitalism and in return you get to consume lots of stuff". If we remove the "consume lots of stuff" part of the equation, then I doubt people would be happy with the "give up your autonomy and stability" part.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Energy efficiency is skyrocketing though. My house uses 25% the energy it would with if we installed 20 year old appliances (even ignoring improvements to insulation).
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Yes you're absolutely right

pstrateman 4y ago

You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.

wccrawford 4y ago
That's true, and it's why other sources of energy are useful still, such as wind and nuclear and hydro. But I also think we'll never get to the point that everyone has solar installed. There are plenty of situations where it doesn't make sense, such as properties with lots of taller trees around short buildings. Also, generating 120% generally doesn't make sense because the payout from the electric company for the other 20% is pitiful. A battery makes sense for a lot of people for a few reasons, too, so the power company doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do all of that, either. We did it mainly for relief from power outages, but it also works well for places with prices that change by time of day.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Solar is so damn cheap it almost makes sense to set up supplemental systems even if you only get like 10% of the power rated on the panel. Panels are like $1 per nominal watt
thelastgallon 4y ago
A comment like this comes up in every discussion of renewables and needs to die. We don't need separate stationery storage, enormous storage capacity will be free as car batteries. EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030 [1]. By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars anyways. It is decentralized, no single point of failure. This is the sweetest kind of energy demand, can charge whenever electricity prices are negative or zero. Cars are parked nearly all the time, grid adaptations will evolve demand management. Cars will supply power back to the grid at its highest prices, providing a source of income for EV owners. [1] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-ZEV-Dashboard-Sep-2022.pdf https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-Z...

ericpauley 4y ago

> except heating How much of an impact did this actually make, though, since heating was probably the majority of your emissions to begin with? Solar may be sexy, but depending on your heat source you possibly could have done better by installing a heat pump on grid power.

luckylion 4y ago
Really depends on the insulation if you're in Western Europe close to the sea (making the winters less harsh). I live in a flat and the whole complex has been upgraded with modern insulation and modern windows about five years ago. I turn on the heat on a few days when I feel exceptionally cold, otherwise I don't and it still maintains 18-19° (being chubby helps, that's my comfort temperature). It's not because my neighbors are doing the heating for me -- I've talked to them, and they barely ever turn it up, either. Granted, that would change somewhat if we get a super harsh winter here, but otherwise: I consume much more electrical power than heating.