3 ms·

Sure but how many of these locations are there? You don't just need a hill, you need large amounts of water available. Not to mention the construction is defini

by rapsey 4y ago

Sure but how many of these locations are there? You don't just need a hill, you need large amounts of water available. Not to mention the construction is definitely not cheap or fast. I mean there is a shit ton of land available in say Spain for solar+hydro plants. No matter the lower efficiency, you could build enough to power Europe.

shagie 4y ago
What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels? - https://youtu.be/62ASvupr8Zg https://youtu.be/62ASvupr8Zg The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa - https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o One of the difficult problems with extremely large solar projects is the infrastructure to move the power. In a lot of these cases, the space to build solar is large areas of land that no one uses... which means that there's not much infrastructure to build the solar power plants, and then not much infrastructure to move that power back to places where people live. Yes, there's a lot of land that could be used for solar. Moving the enough power to power all of Spain (or all of Europe) based on solar requires some very impressive transmission lines.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Well there's also this thing called "roofs" and there is collectively a lot of them. While the economic efficiency of massively distributing your solar collection across residential and commercial buildings is less than a grid scale, at the same time you get far more resilience with all the buildings having local energy generating capacity in disaster situations. It also alleviates the total amount of energy the grid needs to transport (especially for home/business charging of EV vehicles), so grid development/maintenance costs will stay sane. Not that grid scale isn't important. Heat pumps, home geothermal, residential solar, grid solar, wind, battery storage, pumped hydro storage, and whatever else works will be necessary. Hopefully synthetic fuels / algae fuels / aluminum air batteries / next gen nuclear / grid geothermal can also all contribute.

by rapsey 4y ago

shagie 4y ago

What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels? - https://youtu.be/62ASvupr8Zg https://youtu.be/62ASvupr8Zg The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa - https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o One of the difficult problems with extremely large solar projects is the infrastructure to move the power. In a lot of these cases, the space to build solar is large areas of land that no one uses... which means that there's not much infrastructure to build the solar power plants, and then not much infrastructure to move that power back to places where people live. Yes, there's a lot of land that could be used for solar. Moving the enough power to power all of Spain (or all of Europe) based on solar requires some very impressive transmission lines.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Well there's also this thing called "roofs" and there is collectively a lot of them. While the economic efficiency of massively distributing your solar collection across residential and commercial buildings is less than a grid scale, at the same time you get far more resilience with all the buildings having local energy generating capacity in disaster situations. It also alleviates the total amount of energy the grid needs to transport (especially for home/business charging of EV vehicles), so grid development/maintenance costs will stay sane. Not that grid scale isn't important. Heat pumps, home geothermal, residential solar, grid solar, wind, battery storage, pumped hydro storage, and whatever else works will be necessary. Hopefully synthetic fuels / algae fuels / aluminum air batteries / next gen nuclear / grid geothermal can also all contribute.