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All countries individually - sure. But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins. You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and con

All countries individually - sure. But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins. You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) you get permanent solar without storage.

pstrateman 3y ago
Night time.
klysm 3y ago
Clouds though?
- onethought 3y ago
  When you look at pictures of the planet from space. How much land can you see? Are there places you always see land? Put the panels there.
beachy 3y ago
Most locations can experience many hours or days of cloud cover, which can slash solar panel output by e.g 90%. That's what intermittent means in the context of solar.
- onethought 3y ago
  No it doesn’t. Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved. (And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x)
  - sofixa 3y ago
    What about a multi-month event with overcast weather with low winds over a whole continent (it was the case across most of Europe in 2020)? Just over provision by 100x? Is it still cheaper if you include all the land used?
    - onethought 3y ago
      Pretty sure it stays quite sunny in the desert. Also, there are quite a lot of deserts around the world. The land given it serves no other purpose is probably not expensive.
      - sofixa 3y ago
        How do you transport the electricity from the desert to where it's actually needed? Transmission losses and infrastructure costs make that cost prohibitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
        onethought 3y ago
        I think as other have pointed out HVDC lines make it a possibility. I don't quite understand the point made in the video about "expensive infrastructure to convert AC to DC"... wouldn't solar farms be generating in DC? Is the infrastructure in order to get the voltage up? Couldn't I string enough solar panels to increase the voltage? We are already doing projects like this [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved. For my country (France) IIRC it would require something like 30x more solar to cope with clouds + low light during winter. Take UK or northern Europe and you'd need 50x. > And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x What are you smoking? Also it would generate about 100 times more wastes (not talking about high activity waste of course, in which case it would be like a million time more waste)
    - onethought 3y ago
      What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process? So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive
      - kgabis 3y ago
        Of course nuclear generates less waste than intermittent sources like solar or wind. Nuclear occupies orders of magnitude less land, requires less concrete, steel, copper, aluminium. And it's still comparing apples to oranges since nuclear is not intermittent and doesn't require building extra storage and grid infrastructure to account for variability.
        onethought 3y ago
        Oh, you are saying something that is used productively is waste. So nuclear plants waste heaps of water. By your measure.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        > What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process? I'm talking about the panels themselves after they reached their end of life. > So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive Nuclear power density is incredibly high: you build 1 concrete bunker and 3 supporting buildings and you have more than a gigawatt of power. For solar you need a square kilometer of solar panels to get 0.1GW. Compare those two places next to where I live: - the nuclear plant: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188 - the solar farm: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665 Roughly the same area. The solar farm has 55MW of power. The nuclear plant has 3.6GW, 65 times higher. And the nuclear plant's life will be 60 years at least, which means that over its lifetime the panels would need to be changed 3 times. And that's if there's no hail to damage them… And this calculation only counts Power, if you did the same calculation for actual energy produced the difference would be around ten time worse.
acover 3y ago
Transmission loss will kill you. It's like 1% per 100 miles depending on the voltage.
- dools 3y ago
  That’s for AC thought right? Ultra high voltage direct current is pretty efficient for transmission I thought
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Per 1000km (670 miles) AC's efficiency tops out at 6.7% losses, and DC 3.5%. The earth's circumference is 40,000 km, or 24,000 miles. Even if hurricanes and monsoon seasons weren't a problem, you're still looking at obscene transmission losses to get energy to NYC in the middle of the night- say 55% or worse... and that's not even counting the fact that the lines can't hug the earth's surface, they need to run along the bottom of the ocean floors to avoid damage by storms, boats and currents.
    - kgabis 3y ago
      Do we even have enough copper to pull that off?
      - onethought 3y ago
        We’ve used 700m metric tons thus far. There is a further known deposits of 2.1b metric tons still in the ground. So yes, we do.
        zdragnar 3y ago
        The emissions we would create to produce that much aluminum, steel and concrete would almost certainly make things far worse far faster than if we were to gradually adopt more renewables and build nuclear, and skip the global grid altogether. I recall the register running the numbers on the idea several years back, and it wasn't pretty.
pdpi 3y ago
> You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) you get permanent solar without storage. In theory? Yes. In practice? You have one whole hemisphere powering the other hemisphere, which makes transmission a brutal challenge.
- onethought 3y ago
  Agree. That’s the tricky bit. But it’s also just straight up solvable engineering challenge. Which we’ve proved as a species we are pretty good at those.
prettyStandard 3y ago
High voltage intercontinental direct current could really make this possible.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins. FYI clouds exist as well. > You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) It would cost orders of magnitude more in infra for the connection part that the power generation would (well, except for the solar panels you'd need to put on the Pacific Ocean, which is almost an hemisphere in itself, of course)
- onethought 3y ago
  If 18% is nearly a hemisphere. Agree the connection part would be tricky. But there vast majority of things need to be connected up anyway. We seem to have been fine with building gas pipelines that span huge chunks of the world.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > If 18% is nearly a hemisphere. That's a stupid metric, especially when you consider that the limit between the Pacific and Antarctic Ocean is completely arbitrary. Just spin it and you'll see what I mean: https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/ https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/ It doesn't really matter if you have some daylight remaining in the Americas while the sun is rising in Asia, all the solar energy is going to over the Pacific and will be for hours before it fully reaches Asia. > Agree the connection part would be tricky It would be “tricky” in the same way space colonization would be “tricky”… Like not entirely theoretically impossible, but still very far from what's practical today.
    - onethought 3y ago
      No, not like that at all. Laying cable is not difficult. Manufacturing 10,000km+ of cable is difficult, but we literally already have factories doing it. No where near space colonisation difficult. We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources? I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.

pstrateman 3y ago

Night time.

klysm 3y ago

Clouds though?

onethought 3y ago
When you look at pictures of the planet from space. How much land can you see? Are there places you always see land? Put the panels there.

beachy 3y ago

Most locations can experience many hours or days of cloud cover, which can slash solar panel output by e.g 90%. That's what intermittent means in the context of solar.

onethought 3y ago
No it doesn’t. Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved. (And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x)
- sofixa 3y ago
  What about a multi-month event with overcast weather with low winds over a whole continent (it was the case across most of Europe in 2020)? Just over provision by 100x? Is it still cheaper if you include all the land used?
  - onethought 3y ago
    Pretty sure it stays quite sunny in the desert. Also, there are quite a lot of deserts around the world. The land given it serves no other purpose is probably not expensive.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      How do you transport the electricity from the desert to where it's actually needed? Transmission losses and infrastructure costs make that cost prohibitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
      - onethought 3y ago
        I think as other have pointed out HVDC lines make it a possibility. I don't quite understand the point made in the video about "expensive infrastructure to convert AC to DC"... wouldn't solar farms be generating in DC? Is the infrastructure in order to get the voltage up? Couldn't I string enough solar panels to increase the voltage? We are already doing projects like this [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved. For my country (France) IIRC it would require something like 30x more solar to cope with clouds + low light during winter. Take UK or northern Europe and you'd need 50x. > And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x What are you smoking? Also it would generate about 100 times more wastes (not talking about high activity waste of course, in which case it would be like a million time more waste)
  - onethought 3y ago
    What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process? So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive
    - kgabis 3y ago
      Of course nuclear generates less waste than intermittent sources like solar or wind. Nuclear occupies orders of magnitude less land, requires less concrete, steel, copper, aluminium. And it's still comparing apples to oranges since nuclear is not intermittent and doesn't require building extra storage and grid infrastructure to account for variability.
      - onethought 3y ago
        Oh, you are saying something that is used productively is waste. So nuclear plants waste heaps of water. By your measure.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process? I'm talking about the panels themselves after they reached their end of life. > So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive Nuclear power density is incredibly high: you build 1 concrete bunker and 3 supporting buildings and you have more than a gigawatt of power. For solar you need a square kilometer of solar panels to get 0.1GW. Compare those two places next to where I live: - the nuclear plant: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188 - the solar farm: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665 Roughly the same area. The solar farm has 55MW of power. The nuclear plant has 3.6GW, 65 times higher. And the nuclear plant's life will be 60 years at least, which means that over its lifetime the panels would need to be changed 3 times. And that's if there's no hail to damage them… And this calculation only counts Power, if you did the same calculation for actual energy produced the difference would be around ten time worse.

acover 3y ago

Transmission loss will kill you. It's like 1% per 100 miles depending on the voltage.

dools 3y ago
That’s for AC thought right? Ultra high voltage direct current is pretty efficient for transmission I thought
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Per 1000km (670 miles) AC's efficiency tops out at 6.7% losses, and DC 3.5%. The earth's circumference is 40,000 km, or 24,000 miles. Even if hurricanes and monsoon seasons weren't a problem, you're still looking at obscene transmission losses to get energy to NYC in the middle of the night- say 55% or worse... and that's not even counting the fact that the lines can't hug the earth's surface, they need to run along the bottom of the ocean floors to avoid damage by storms, boats and currents.
  - kgabis 3y ago
    Do we even have enough copper to pull that off?
    - onethought 3y ago
      We’ve used 700m metric tons thus far. There is a further known deposits of 2.1b metric tons still in the ground. So yes, we do.
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        The emissions we would create to produce that much aluminum, steel and concrete would almost certainly make things far worse far faster than if we were to gradually adopt more renewables and build nuclear, and skip the global grid altogether. I recall the register running the numbers on the idea several years back, and it wasn't pretty.

pdpi 3y ago

> You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) you get permanent solar without storage. In theory? Yes. In practice? You have one whole hemisphere powering the other hemisphere, which makes transmission a brutal challenge.

onethought 3y ago
Agree. That’s the tricky bit. But it’s also just straight up solvable engineering challenge. Which we’ve proved as a species we are pretty good at those.

prettyStandard 3y ago

High voltage intercontinental direct current could really make this possible.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins. FYI clouds exist as well. > You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) It would cost orders of magnitude more in infra for the connection part that the power generation would (well, except for the solar panels you'd need to put on the Pacific Ocean, which is almost an hemisphere in itself, of course)

onethought 3y ago
If 18% is nearly a hemisphere. Agree the connection part would be tricky. But there vast majority of things need to be connected up anyway. We seem to have been fine with building gas pipelines that span huge chunks of the world.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > If 18% is nearly a hemisphere. That's a stupid metric, especially when you consider that the limit between the Pacific and Antarctic Ocean is completely arbitrary. Just spin it and you'll see what I mean: https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/ https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/ It doesn't really matter if you have some daylight remaining in the Americas while the sun is rising in Asia, all the solar energy is going to over the Pacific and will be for hours before it fully reaches Asia. > Agree the connection part would be tricky It would be “tricky” in the same way space colonization would be “tricky”… Like not entirely theoretically impossible, but still very far from what's practical today.
  - onethought 3y ago
    No, not like that at all. Laying cable is not difficult. Manufacturing 10,000km+ of cable is difficult, but we literally already have factories doing it. No where near space colonisation difficult. We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources? I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.