4 ms·

Printable solar will be so cheap that every house facade will have solar put on it. We will have so much energy that we don't know what to do with it.

xerxesaa 3y ago
Can you share more details on this? It sounds a bit overly optimistic, but I admittedly don't have a lot of experience in this space. If you have some links to news articles or publications talking about progress and cost, I'd love to read them.
- jaggederest 3y ago
  https://energy.mit.edu/news/solar-cells-printed-on-paper/ https://energy.mit.edu/news/solar-cells-printed-on-paper/ https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/photovoltaics/printable-solar-cells https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/pho... Seems like cool stuff. Photolithography is very expensive compared to offset printing, so it would be interesting to see low-efficiency but very low cost solar modules using processes more like offset press.
jaggederest 3y ago
I think even today, most places in the US would be better off building solar than nuclear. The opportunity cost alone makes it nonsensical. We're very close to the point where solar + battery quickly and easily replaces the majority of new electrical generation. I live in a place where solar is not even especially viable and it's starting to make economic sense even here. Given the timelines involved in building a nuclear plant, you're better off saving your money for 8 years and then spending 2 years building a solar plant with current tech - prices will drop significantly over the 8 years, so nuclear compares even less favorably.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  I don't understand why we couldn't do both?
  - pbmonster 3y ago
    Renewable and nuclear are not very compatible when they share a grid. For two reasons: * Nuclear requires an extremely expensive initial investment that needs to be recouped. For that to happen, the finished plant needs to make as much electricity as possible. This means ramping down a nuclear plant because the sun is high and there's a steady wind spinning all the turbines at max capacity for the next couple of days makes zero economic sense. This is the reason why nuclear powerplants in the US don't even really have the technical means to reduce their output. They are designed from the get-go to be run at 100% capacity, always. And while this argument holds for all powerplants, the economics of nuclear are cut so close, they risk becoming a net loss at current electricity prices if they are ever forced to throttle down. Even if you run them 60, 70 or 80 years. * Even if you build your reactors in a way that allows them to be run at reduced output (the French did that, you obviously need this capability if your entire grid runs on nuclear), doing so is complicated and requires many reactors to work in concert. The reason for this is technical: if you significantly reduce the output of a nuclear reactor, it poisons its own fuel rods with radio-isotopes that make any significant increase in output impossible for tens of days, sometimes for over a month. So if your nuclear reactors do grid-following, you need 30+ of them to take turns, reducing output one night and recovering for a month afterwards while the other reactors take turns doing the same. The exception to that is of course hydro. Nuclear loves hydro, they complement each other perfectly.
    - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
      Interesting! I was unaware of the limitations of scaling down nuclear reactors. I had never considered that a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something? I wonder if the new modular reactors allow to better micro-manage the amount of capacity you are adding to any grid.
      - pbmonster 3y ago
        > a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something It's more complicated than that. Let's say you have just one reactor powering one city, nothing else. What happens as everyone goes to bed and turns of their appliances? The number of consumers goes down and the amount of electrical power consumed drops. What does that mean in terms of the electrical circuit between the city and the steam turbine? The electrical current drawn by the city decreases. Less current flowing out of the generator connected to the turbine means there is less back-action pushing against the turbine shaft. But the reactor is still producing the same amount of heat/steam - which means the turbine immediately speeds up. Because the turbine is spinning faster, the generator is now spinning faster, so the AC power is not 60Hz anymore but also increasing. With higher RPM on the generator, the voltage also increases. So the city now gets higher frequency at higher voltage. Both are very bad. Long before the frequency reaches 60.1 Hz, grid operators would normally switch on storage facilities or drop powerplants that can easily just shut down (all renewables and fast cycling natural gas turbines can throttle down or just go offline in seconds, but the other fossil fuel plants and nukes take hours). If you can't do that, you need to dump large amounts of power in other ways. And that's not easy. There are load resistors, that just turn electricity into heat. But you can easily burn those with a gigawatt plant, its not easy to get rid of a couple of unwanted megawatt. In theory you could also vent steam before the turbine to prevent it from accelerating. Just turn more of the nuclear energy into waste heat instead of electricity. But that's a really bad idea in a nuclear reactor, because you need to keep the reactor cool at all costs and messing with where the heat flows seriously threatens not enough heat flowing away from the primary cooling cycle - after all, this entire thing is designed for around 30% of the energy flowing to the generator. So doing something like that would mean engaging the emergency systems of the reactor.
XorNot 3y ago
The roof of my parents house is entirely covered in solar panels. They make about what they need per day, sometimes under. These are high efficiency systems. There is not going to be substantially more energy in solar coming from bad angles or blocked by partial shade. And however cheap you make the panels, you've still got to get the energy onto the grid with inverters.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  So if we slightly increase the efficiency they will be set. So all private energy consumption can be - according to you - satisfied with roof top panels on private houses. Though I think 40kwp looks like a lot of energy for two people to use. So we have the facades of the buildings left to produce additionl energy. And all the facades of glass facade office high rises. The roof tops of all factories.

xerxesaa 3y ago

Can you share more details on this? It sounds a bit overly optimistic, but I admittedly don't have a lot of experience in this space. If you have some links to news articles or publications talking about progress and cost, I'd love to read them.

jaggederest 3y ago
https://energy.mit.edu/news/solar-cells-printed-on-paper/ https://energy.mit.edu/news/solar-cells-printed-on-paper/ https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/photovoltaics/printable-solar-cells https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/pho... Seems like cool stuff. Photolithography is very expensive compared to offset printing, so it would be interesting to see low-efficiency but very low cost solar modules using processes more like offset press.

jaggederest 3y ago

I think even today, most places in the US would be better off building solar than nuclear. The opportunity cost alone makes it nonsensical. We're very close to the point where solar + battery quickly and easily replaces the majority of new electrical generation. I live in a place where solar is not even especially viable and it's starting to make economic sense even here. Given the timelines involved in building a nuclear plant, you're better off saving your money for 8 years and then spending 2 years building a solar plant with current tech - prices will drop significantly over the 8 years, so nuclear compares even less favorably.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
I don't understand why we couldn't do both?
- pbmonster 3y ago
  Renewable and nuclear are not very compatible when they share a grid. For two reasons: * Nuclear requires an extremely expensive initial investment that needs to be recouped. For that to happen, the finished plant needs to make as much electricity as possible. This means ramping down a nuclear plant because the sun is high and there's a steady wind spinning all the turbines at max capacity for the next couple of days makes zero economic sense. This is the reason why nuclear powerplants in the US don't even really have the technical means to reduce their output. They are designed from the get-go to be run at 100% capacity, always. And while this argument holds for all powerplants, the economics of nuclear are cut so close, they risk becoming a net loss at current electricity prices if they are ever forced to throttle down. Even if you run them 60, 70 or 80 years. * Even if you build your reactors in a way that allows them to be run at reduced output (the French did that, you obviously need this capability if your entire grid runs on nuclear), doing so is complicated and requires many reactors to work in concert. The reason for this is technical: if you significantly reduce the output of a nuclear reactor, it poisons its own fuel rods with radio-isotopes that make any significant increase in output impossible for tens of days, sometimes for over a month. So if your nuclear reactors do grid-following, you need 30+ of them to take turns, reducing output one night and recovering for a month afterwards while the other reactors take turns doing the same. The exception to that is of course hydro. Nuclear loves hydro, they complement each other perfectly.
  - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
    Interesting! I was unaware of the limitations of scaling down nuclear reactors. I had never considered that a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something? I wonder if the new modular reactors allow to better micro-manage the amount of capacity you are adding to any grid.
    - pbmonster 3y ago
      > a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something It's more complicated than that. Let's say you have just one reactor powering one city, nothing else. What happens as everyone goes to bed and turns of their appliances? The number of consumers goes down and the amount of electrical power consumed drops. What does that mean in terms of the electrical circuit between the city and the steam turbine? The electrical current drawn by the city decreases. Less current flowing out of the generator connected to the turbine means there is less back-action pushing against the turbine shaft. But the reactor is still producing the same amount of heat/steam - which means the turbine immediately speeds up. Because the turbine is spinning faster, the generator is now spinning faster, so the AC power is not 60Hz anymore but also increasing. With higher RPM on the generator, the voltage also increases. So the city now gets higher frequency at higher voltage. Both are very bad. Long before the frequency reaches 60.1 Hz, grid operators would normally switch on storage facilities or drop powerplants that can easily just shut down (all renewables and fast cycling natural gas turbines can throttle down or just go offline in seconds, but the other fossil fuel plants and nukes take hours). If you can't do that, you need to dump large amounts of power in other ways. And that's not easy. There are load resistors, that just turn electricity into heat. But you can easily burn those with a gigawatt plant, its not easy to get rid of a couple of unwanted megawatt. In theory you could also vent steam before the turbine to prevent it from accelerating. Just turn more of the nuclear energy into waste heat instead of electricity. But that's a really bad idea in a nuclear reactor, because you need to keep the reactor cool at all costs and messing with where the heat flows seriously threatens not enough heat flowing away from the primary cooling cycle - after all, this entire thing is designed for around 30% of the energy flowing to the generator. So doing something like that would mean engaging the emergency systems of the reactor.

XorNot 3y ago

The roof of my parents house is entirely covered in solar panels. They make about what they need per day, sometimes under. These are high efficiency systems. There is not going to be substantially more energy in solar coming from bad angles or blocked by partial shade. And however cheap you make the panels, you've still got to get the energy onto the grid with inverters.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
So if we slightly increase the efficiency they will be set. So all private energy consumption can be - according to you - satisfied with roof top panels on private houses. Though I think 40kwp looks like a lot of energy for two people to use. So we have the facades of the buildings left to produce additionl energy. And all the facades of glass facade office high rises. The roof tops of all factories.