7 ms·

Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses

71 points by geox 3y ago

duxup 3y ago
Is there a maintenance issue here? Most solar setups I see seem to focus on simple static structure that I presume is intended to be low cost / low maintenance. Is maybe the altitude / exposure here maybe a substantial advantage?
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  I think that they simply don't want to tear down the dishes because they will be expensive to rebuild, so putting solar panels on them is a way to get some money out of the dish that will at least cover maintenance of the structure. Then when in the future they need more capacity they can put in better receivers and motors quickly.
  - duxup 3y ago
    Got it, might be "good enough while it's working" and can reconsider later.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    The article does not mention it (or I did not find it skimming), but I'd consider it safe to assume that there's also a bit of a conservation angle: once a piece of alpine engineering is established as part of the landscape, people seem to like it a lot. Even the very same people who would pick up torch and pitchfork against anything new I think. Imagine the outrage a proposal to return the slopes of the 48 Stelvio hairpins back to their natural state, or the Landwasser viaduct, or any of the Kaprun dams. As much outrage as a proposal to install new heliostats on yet untouched rocks would get, or perhaps even more. Those dishes are monuments to what in hindsight is called the Space Age and while they'd probably fail to qualify for conservation for conservation's sake alone, giving them a second career as heliostats seems like a very pragmatic way too keep them, and keep them serviced even.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    Plus, you never know when you might need a giant satellite dish!
- dewey 3y ago
  "They can be flexibly aligned with the sun and thus generate more electricity than conventional solar panels."
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Got to be the most expensive possible way to put up a few square meters of solar panels. In Texas, where land is cheap and sun plentiful, they have a project where they're just laying them out on the ground. No support structure, no expensive clockwork to tip them this way and that. They want to get more watts, they buy more dirt-cheap panels and lay them on the ground too. See, all that support structure costs more than the panels these days. Way more. You want to spend your money wisely, ditch the supports, buy more panels instead.
- gaazoh 3y ago
  This is Switzerland, where land is not as plentiful as in Texas, not by a long shot. Plus, the support structure is free in this case, it's definitely cheaper to lay solar panels on those dishes than tearing them down just to lay panels on the floor. Also, having solar panels laying flat on ground level sounds like skimming on infrastructure to save money short term but having to pay higher maintenance long term: you have to keep the panels relatively clean for them to work, having them slanted and elevated a bit means that less dirt get on top of them and rain washes most of it regularly.
  - thomasmg 3y ago
    My guess is: the problem is not the price of the land or the price of the structure, but the permits. In Switzerland, you can put solar panels on existing buildings without requiring a permit. As the article says, there are many "large" solar panel projects planned in Switzerland, specially in the mountains, where the snow will reflect the light and increase electricity production in winter (where electricity is the most expensive). But it takes a very long time (sometimes many, many years) until those projects are approved, if they are approved at all. This is known to be a problem, and government did try to speed this up, but it still is far too slow. (I'm Swiss.)
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Texas uses robot vacuum cleaners. Not a lot of rain. Definitely a sweet spot for them. Anyway. I'd guess they'd do better to lay them on the ground next to those dishes, than the expense of climbing up there and fastening them to that massively expensive superstructure. Not to mention the danger to life and limb, climbing around up there. Generally speaking it's just a mistake to mount solar panels in some difficult-to-reach expensive place. Optimal: A large flat space near the existing grid, with generous road access and clearance. On cheap land and cheap supports. Where it can be serviced, not too far from the service center. Those dishes fail on half of those metrics.
h2odragon 3y ago
"Global glut turns solar panels into garden fencing option" https://archive.ph/AAIKe https://archive.ph/AAIKe
- Moto7451 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, with Bifacial panels (they make power from both sides) and the right layout, vertical panels like a fence actually do work.
  - mey 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/5AVO1IyfA9M https://youtu.be/5AVO1IyfA9M this person did a side by side experiment on their property with both angled and vertical bifacial with some interesting results. Their advantage didn't seem to be efficiency but consistency.
- ponector 3y ago
  >> US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen pressed China to stop flooding the market with cheap green technology exports. What a joke! Wouldn't everyone benefit from cheap green technology?
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    US-based panel manufacturers won't benefit.
    - yumraj 3y ago
      Exactly, and when China has a monopoly, they can jack up the prices.
      - bootsmann 3y ago
        But solar panels aren't chips, the hurdle for new entrants is significantly lower. I don't think this is a strategic move by China and more a result of Xis attempt to reignite their economic growth.
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
Just want to know, why are they using bifacial solar panels, considering the cost benefits?
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  AFAIK it's not uncommon for the cells to be visible from both sides even with normal panels.
ambyra 3y ago
Is that really the optimal arrangement for solar panels on a dish? Looks like 40% empty
- ape4 3y ago
  Of course, the issue is fitting rectangular panels into a circle. Since, apparently, solar panels are cheap now - perhaps they could overlap panels to cover all of the circle.
  - whiterock 3y ago
    Overlapping doesn‘t work due to the fact that individual small cells of a bigger panel - when shaded - greatly diminish the output of the entire solar panel.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      And yet they left the focal point and its support poles there. No I agree with the people calling bullshit/publicity stunt. This array irritates me.
      - ambyra 3y ago
        Yeah when I read the title I thought they were covering the old dish with mirrors and putting a collector at the focal point. This is much less interesting :(
        hinkley 3y ago
        Right!?
      - robocat 3y ago
        I presume they point the dish at the sun, so the shadow is in a fixed position. However the video shows during installation so not pointing at sun - but shadows that you see don't appear significant
dappermanneke 3y ago
[flagged]
- chrystalkey 3y ago
  ad hominem never helped anyone
Aspos 3y ago
My old house has a roof with complex geometry which does not lend itself to rectangular solar panels. I wonder why triangles are not the standard shape for solar panels as triangular panels would be more efficient in tiling surfaces available. I bet those antennas can be tiled more efficiently with triangles.
- Hextinium 3y ago
  Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away a different tiling advantage.
  - Aspos 3y ago
    But triangle is a rectangle cut in half, no?
    - lazide 3y ago
      From a manufacturing and installation perspective, triangles are twice the hassle for a given square footage.
      - Aspos 3y ago
        True! Assuming manufacturing will be +10% and installation will take 2x time and assuming half panel will produce half the power, my back of the napkin calculation suggests my solar roof would pay for itself not in 5 but in 6 years and would keep producing $ for the rest of its lifespan.
        lazide 3y ago
        My point is that you’re an expensive niche (manufacturing and installation wise) in a market usually competing on $/sqft. Manufacturing would be more than +10% because existing lines would need to be retooled to produce it, and it would require different packaging. Volume will be lower as well, so margins need to be higher. 50% more expensive? Or maybe even the same price as a normal panel twice the wattage. Installation would be more than 2x because standard mounting wouldn’t work, so it would be 3x the time (probably) plus figuring out how to mount them. Since you have an odd shaped roof, that would also likely increase difficulty/costs. Very high snow load or flexible solar panels are similar (but larger) niches. Looks like someone does make them though! And my guess is someone does already have all the mounting knowledge, it just may not be the regular solar install guy, so it may take tracking someone down. [https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-modules https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-module...] Unlike the other products in their site, that link doesn’t have specs and wants someone to ‘contact us for details’ which doesn’t seem like a good sign. This is also why utility scale solar has been the trend lately - it’s often more economical to turn some random low value flat land half way across the state/country into a maximally cost effective solar installation and then sell the power. Which means square panels on the simplest and easiest racking they can figure out. Every random person figuring out their own bespoke solution is a lot more expensive. if it will actually pay back that quickly, that’s awesome - then you get to bypass whatever insanity your utility is doing to cause those high prices. I haven’t heard of any up to code installations having nearly that good a payoff. Where are you located? Bespoke is a lot more fun/cooler though.
wkat4242 3y ago
Weird, a parabolic dish makes no sense if you point it directly at the sun. Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles. A flat plate mounted on the existing az/el tracking of the original dish would be optimal. Stuff that plate full of panels and track the whole contraption to the sun and all panels will be perfectly aligned. If you replace the panels with mirrors and have an ultra efficient high power panel in the middle the dish form factor would work (and this is how they built them in the 80s though I think they were heating water for steam back then) but that's not what they're doing here.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Yeah the real story here seems to be that solar panels now so cheap that people can waste them on pointless stunts like this.
  - pcl 3y ago
    Put more generously: solar panels are so cheap that other factors (existing scaffold, ease of installation, aesthetics, …) dominate installation decisions.
- zardo 3y ago
  You save maybe a few thousand dollars in solar panels by installing the flat plate, but you have to validate the additional structure.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles. I do wonder how electricity pricing plays into this: having panels that are optimized for production in mornings and afternoons will produce less overall, but could provide more valuable power overall.
  - blkhawk 3y ago
    you could just add a triangular shim under each panel that make them flat towards a common level. Each ring would need their own shim height but since you need some mounting hardware anyway this would add only a bit of weight.
panick21_ 3y ago
We should have been building new nuclear reactors for the last 20 years. Its so fucking obvious it isn't even funny. At least our idiot nation didn't follow the fucking morons in Germany with their 'destroy the nuclear fleet' policy.
- Morelesshell 3y ago
  Its not obvious. And stop insulting my country. WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us. My parents were probably young parents and it was not clear at all what the real impact was. The news suggested to clean/wash all vegetables and still TODAY you need to check your hunt for too high radiactive values. It was NEVER obvious and Fukushima showed again HOW unreliable it can be and how little we know about this. Am i against Nuclear? No. But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar. I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs. Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win. Edit: PV are just crystals, they should be even cheaper to build than now and with more flexible PVs you can do a lot of interesting and reasonable things. You can use them as fences (there was already a news article about it), you can put them on facades, around light posts, on your balcony, use them as sun shades etc. Wind became a lot better with no one really talking about it. And wind energy grows quadratically by radius. Big wind mills make A LOT more energy Batteries will be a game changer. We need them for EVs anway, we use them in laptops and smartphones. In germany we have a very good power grid but in 2th world countries like the USA you have a lot of Grid problems. Add batteries to it. And even in countries like canada you have the 'outback' with grid issues after bad weather. Alone the batteries for EVs will help a lot of providing necessary buffer capacity. We tend to forget how big and impactfull our oil consumption actually is. Its a lot easier to have batteries and 'thin' power lines than transporting oil from the ground to refineries to gas stations. The current situation is not better, its just paid off
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    I'm Swiss. Complaining is what we do. > WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us. Sadly yes, but at least we didn't lose our brain as much as Germany. The whole 'we are psychologically damaged and so can't evaluate properly' doesn't really work for me as an argument. Yes, my parents are also psychologically damaged by this episode, if you show them scientific data they get angry. The last 50 years of fear mongering and propaganda have worked well. The whole 'any mushroom might kill you' is just nonsense. > But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar. Nuclear is a good idea climate change or not. Most nuclear reactors were build for practical reasons not climate. And nuclear would have been commercially the best option by far, if back then we actually evaluate coal plants the same way as we do now in terms of fossil fuels and regulation. We already have the right combination, water and nuclear. But instead of having our own policy we adopted the 'Germany will surely have cheap energy for us' strategy and that backfired. > I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs. My math indicates something very different. Germany in 2000 had 20% nuclear, even with minimal learning effects, building nuclear would have been considerably cheaper then all the cost Germany had for their 'green' (coal energy) strategy. Not just the investment, Germany also had very high electricity prices during that whole time. And with the energy crises the amount of money they are using reduce the impact of the energy crisis is immense. And with all that investment and cost, they aren't even close to fully replacing fossil fuel. Battery are nonsense, so far can only be used for grid stabilization, not any serious outage. And if you take the cost large scale batteries (that have yet to be invented) into account, the whole solar/wind/battery plan looks even worse. Go look at Li-Battery prices, they are not coming down in price anywhere as close to as people thought. And the grid scale battery startups are all taking much, much longer then claimed or are bankrupt. > Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win. A single nuclear reactor is economics of scale. And if you build many of them, you get economics of scale in that too. As I said, even if you consider the price paid by UAE for South Korean plants (literally built in a country with no nuclear regulator and no educated workforce), and you just take that cost. Germany would have saved money. If you take into account the cost reduction from building 40-50 plants, its not even close. The simple fact is the fastest most efficent and cheapest de-fossilization ever done has been done with nuclear. We have literal prove that this is true. When all these countries were sitting around formulating the Kyoto protocol, France already had a green grid. P.S: Fukushima killed less people then German coal plants do every year. German coal plants have been systematically murdering the population for centuries, not to mention causing all kinds of health issues, particularly in children. All this ridiculous panic about radioactive mushrooms, despite there not being a single reliable cause of death from that while everybody is having lung issues because of coal. Its just incredible how people who are usually smart and informed on a subject believe all the Greenpeace panic propaganda. Turning of nuclear before coal is a gross criminal act, and the people responsible should be imprisoned.
Morelesshell 3y ago
While i'm slightly surprised by the overall quality of the comments here: It looks really really neat. It looks like something out of a scifi movie and i like big dishes.
Lukas_Skywalker 3y ago
A bit of a tangent, but I think the dishes they are using here were once part of Onyx, a rather large communication interception system [0]. It got famous in 2006 when it intercepted proof of CIA black sites (mentioned in the Wikipedia article as well). Until then, the Swiss public didn't really know the scope of the system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)
gumby 3y ago
> "Former satellite antennas are ideal as solar energy systems," Trackers almost never make economic sense; panels are now so cheap that it is usually cheaper to just take up more area. But when the hardware has already been deployed and then abandoned, this can work. Hence the word "former" in that quote in the article!
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
No Datadome Javascript: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4633260773345847&w=4sSFiMhlWvY69uBh320k20jVsneIyguB https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4633260773345847&w=4sSFiMh...

71 points by geox 3y ago

Is there a maintenance issue here? Most solar setups I see seem to focus on simple static structure that I presume is intended to be low cost / low maintenance. Is maybe the altitude / exposure here maybe a substantial advantage?

SiempreViernes 3y ago
I think that they simply don't want to tear down the dishes because they will be expensive to rebuild, so putting solar panels on them is a way to get some money out of the dish that will at least cover maintenance of the structure. Then when in the future they need more capacity they can put in better receivers and motors quickly.
- duxup 3y ago
  Got it, might be "good enough while it's working" and can reconsider later.
- usrusr 3y ago
  The article does not mention it (or I did not find it skimming), but I'd consider it safe to assume that there's also a bit of a conservation angle: once a piece of alpine engineering is established as part of the landscape, people seem to like it a lot. Even the very same people who would pick up torch and pitchfork against anything new I think. Imagine the outrage a proposal to return the slopes of the 48 Stelvio hairpins back to their natural state, or the Landwasser viaduct, or any of the Kaprun dams. As much outrage as a proposal to install new heliostats on yet untouched rocks would get, or perhaps even more. Those dishes are monuments to what in hindsight is called the Space Age and while they'd probably fail to qualify for conservation for conservation's sake alone, giving them a second career as heliostats seems like a very pragmatic way too keep them, and keep them serviced even.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Plus, you never know when you might need a giant satellite dish!
dewey 3y ago
"They can be flexibly aligned with the sun and thus generate more electricity than conventional solar panels."

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Got to be the most expensive possible way to put up a few square meters of solar panels. In Texas, where land is cheap and sun plentiful, they have a project where they're just laying them out on the ground. No support structure, no expensive clockwork to tip them this way and that. They want to get more watts, they buy more dirt-cheap panels and lay them on the ground too. See, all that support structure costs more than the panels these days. Way more. You want to spend your money wisely, ditch the supports, buy more panels instead.

gaazoh 3y ago
This is Switzerland, where land is not as plentiful as in Texas, not by a long shot. Plus, the support structure is free in this case, it's definitely cheaper to lay solar panels on those dishes than tearing them down just to lay panels on the floor. Also, having solar panels laying flat on ground level sounds like skimming on infrastructure to save money short term but having to pay higher maintenance long term: you have to keep the panels relatively clean for them to work, having them slanted and elevated a bit means that less dirt get on top of them and rain washes most of it regularly.
- thomasmg 3y ago
  My guess is: the problem is not the price of the land or the price of the structure, but the permits. In Switzerland, you can put solar panels on existing buildings without requiring a permit. As the article says, there are many "large" solar panel projects planned in Switzerland, specially in the mountains, where the snow will reflect the light and increase electricity production in winter (where electricity is the most expensive). But it takes a very long time (sometimes many, many years) until those projects are approved, if they are approved at all. This is known to be a problem, and government did try to speed this up, but it still is far too slow. (I'm Swiss.)
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Texas uses robot vacuum cleaners. Not a lot of rain. Definitely a sweet spot for them. Anyway. I'd guess they'd do better to lay them on the ground next to those dishes, than the expense of climbing up there and fastening them to that massively expensive superstructure. Not to mention the danger to life and limb, climbing around up there. Generally speaking it's just a mistake to mount solar panels in some difficult-to-reach expensive place. Optimal: A large flat space near the existing grid, with generous road access and clearance. On cheap land and cheap supports. Where it can be serviced, not too far from the service center. Those dishes fail on half of those metrics.

h2odragon 3y ago

"Global glut turns solar panels into garden fencing option" https://archive.ph/AAIKe https://archive.ph/AAIKe

Moto7451 3y ago
For what it’s worth, with Bifacial panels (they make power from both sides) and the right layout, vertical panels like a fence actually do work.
- mey 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/5AVO1IyfA9M https://youtu.be/5AVO1IyfA9M this person did a side by side experiment on their property with both angled and vertical bifacial with some interesting results. Their advantage didn't seem to be efficiency but consistency.
ponector 3y ago
>> US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen pressed China to stop flooding the market with cheap green technology exports. What a joke! Wouldn't everyone benefit from cheap green technology?
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  US-based panel manufacturers won't benefit.
  - yumraj 3y ago
    Exactly, and when China has a monopoly, they can jack up the prices.
    - bootsmann 3y ago
      But solar panels aren't chips, the hurdle for new entrants is significantly lower. I don't think this is a strategic move by China and more a result of Xis attempt to reignite their economic growth.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

Just want to know, why are they using bifacial solar panels, considering the cost benefits?

nolist_policy 3y ago
AFAIK it's not uncommon for the cells to be visible from both sides even with normal panels.

ambyra 3y ago

Is that really the optimal arrangement for solar panels on a dish? Looks like 40% empty

ape4 3y ago
Of course, the issue is fitting rectangular panels into a circle. Since, apparently, solar panels are cheap now - perhaps they could overlap panels to cover all of the circle.
- whiterock 3y ago
  Overlapping doesn‘t work due to the fact that individual small cells of a bigger panel - when shaded - greatly diminish the output of the entire solar panel.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    And yet they left the focal point and its support poles there. No I agree with the people calling bullshit/publicity stunt. This array irritates me.
    - ambyra 3y ago
      Yeah when I read the title I thought they were covering the old dish with mirrors and putting a collector at the focal point. This is much less interesting :(
      - hinkley 3y ago
        Right!?
    - robocat 3y ago
      I presume they point the dish at the sun, so the shadow is in a fixed position. However the video shows during installation so not pointing at sun - but shadows that you see don't appear significant

dappermanneke 3y ago

[flagged]

chrystalkey 3y ago
ad hominem never helped anyone

Aspos 3y ago

My old house has a roof with complex geometry which does not lend itself to rectangular solar panels. I wonder why triangles are not the standard shape for solar panels as triangular panels would be more efficient in tiling surfaces available. I bet those antennas can be tiled more efficiently with triangles.

Hextinium 3y ago
Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away a different tiling advantage.
- Aspos 3y ago
  But triangle is a rectangle cut in half, no?
  - lazide 3y ago
    From a manufacturing and installation perspective, triangles are twice the hassle for a given square footage.
    - Aspos 3y ago
      True! Assuming manufacturing will be +10% and installation will take 2x time and assuming half panel will produce half the power, my back of the napkin calculation suggests my solar roof would pay for itself not in 5 but in 6 years and would keep producing $ for the rest of its lifespan.
      - lazide 3y ago
        My point is that you’re an expensive niche (manufacturing and installation wise) in a market usually competing on $/sqft. Manufacturing would be more than +10% because existing lines would need to be retooled to produce it, and it would require different packaging. Volume will be lower as well, so margins need to be higher. 50% more expensive? Or maybe even the same price as a normal panel twice the wattage. Installation would be more than 2x because standard mounting wouldn’t work, so it would be 3x the time (probably) plus figuring out how to mount them. Since you have an odd shaped roof, that would also likely increase difficulty/costs. Very high snow load or flexible solar panels are similar (but larger) niches. Looks like someone does make them though! And my guess is someone does already have all the mounting knowledge, it just may not be the regular solar install guy, so it may take tracking someone down. [https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-modules https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-module...] Unlike the other products in their site, that link doesn’t have specs and wants someone to ‘contact us for details’ which doesn’t seem like a good sign. This is also why utility scale solar has been the trend lately - it’s often more economical to turn some random low value flat land half way across the state/country into a maximally cost effective solar installation and then sell the power. Which means square panels on the simplest and easiest racking they can figure out. Every random person figuring out their own bespoke solution is a lot more expensive. if it will actually pay back that quickly, that’s awesome - then you get to bypass whatever insanity your utility is doing to cause those high prices. I haven’t heard of any up to code installations having nearly that good a payoff. Where are you located? Bespoke is a lot more fun/cooler though.

wkat4242 3y ago

Weird, a parabolic dish makes no sense if you point it directly at the sun. Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles. A flat plate mounted on the existing az/el tracking of the original dish would be optimal. Stuff that plate full of panels and track the whole contraption to the sun and all panels will be perfectly aligned. If you replace the panels with mirrors and have an ultra efficient high power panel in the middle the dish form factor would work (and this is how they built them in the 80s though I think they were heating water for steam back then) but that's not what they're doing here.

jeffbee 3y ago
Yeah the real story here seems to be that solar panels now so cheap that people can waste them on pointless stunts like this.
- pcl 3y ago
  Put more generously: solar panels are so cheap that other factors (existing scaffold, ease of installation, aesthetics, …) dominate installation decisions.
zardo 3y ago
You save maybe a few thousand dollars in solar panels by installing the flat plate, but you have to validate the additional structure.
Scoundreller 3y ago
> Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles. I do wonder how electricity pricing plays into this: having panels that are optimized for production in mornings and afternoons will produce less overall, but could provide more valuable power overall.
- blkhawk 3y ago
  you could just add a triangular shim under each panel that make them flat towards a common level. Each ring would need their own shim height but since you need some mounting hardware anyway this would add only a bit of weight.

panick21_ 3y ago

We should have been building new nuclear reactors for the last 20 years. Its so fucking obvious it isn't even funny. At least our idiot nation didn't follow the fucking morons in Germany with their 'destroy the nuclear fleet' policy.

Morelesshell 3y ago
Its not obvious. And stop insulting my country. WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us. My parents were probably young parents and it was not clear at all what the real impact was. The news suggested to clean/wash all vegetables and still TODAY you need to check your hunt for too high radiactive values. It was NEVER obvious and Fukushima showed again HOW unreliable it can be and how little we know about this. Am i against Nuclear? No. But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar. I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs. Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win. Edit: PV are just crystals, they should be even cheaper to build than now and with more flexible PVs you can do a lot of interesting and reasonable things. You can use them as fences (there was already a news article about it), you can put them on facades, around light posts, on your balcony, use them as sun shades etc. Wind became a lot better with no one really talking about it. And wind energy grows quadratically by radius. Big wind mills make A LOT more energy Batteries will be a game changer. We need them for EVs anway, we use them in laptops and smartphones. In germany we have a very good power grid but in 2th world countries like the USA you have a lot of Grid problems. Add batteries to it. And even in countries like canada you have the 'outback' with grid issues after bad weather. Alone the batteries for EVs will help a lot of providing necessary buffer capacity. We tend to forget how big and impactfull our oil consumption actually is. Its a lot easier to have batteries and 'thin' power lines than transporting oil from the ground to refineries to gas stations. The current situation is not better, its just paid off
- panick21_ 3y ago
  I'm Swiss. Complaining is what we do. > WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us. Sadly yes, but at least we didn't lose our brain as much as Germany. The whole 'we are psychologically damaged and so can't evaluate properly' doesn't really work for me as an argument. Yes, my parents are also psychologically damaged by this episode, if you show them scientific data they get angry. The last 50 years of fear mongering and propaganda have worked well. The whole 'any mushroom might kill you' is just nonsense. > But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar. Nuclear is a good idea climate change or not. Most nuclear reactors were build for practical reasons not climate. And nuclear would have been commercially the best option by far, if back then we actually evaluate coal plants the same way as we do now in terms of fossil fuels and regulation. We already have the right combination, water and nuclear. But instead of having our own policy we adopted the 'Germany will surely have cheap energy for us' strategy and that backfired. > I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs. My math indicates something very different. Germany in 2000 had 20% nuclear, even with minimal learning effects, building nuclear would have been considerably cheaper then all the cost Germany had for their 'green' (coal energy) strategy. Not just the investment, Germany also had very high electricity prices during that whole time. And with the energy crises the amount of money they are using reduce the impact of the energy crisis is immense. And with all that investment and cost, they aren't even close to fully replacing fossil fuel. Battery are nonsense, so far can only be used for grid stabilization, not any serious outage. And if you take the cost large scale batteries (that have yet to be invented) into account, the whole solar/wind/battery plan looks even worse. Go look at Li-Battery prices, they are not coming down in price anywhere as close to as people thought. And the grid scale battery startups are all taking much, much longer then claimed or are bankrupt. > Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win. A single nuclear reactor is economics of scale. And if you build many of them, you get economics of scale in that too. As I said, even if you consider the price paid by UAE for South Korean plants (literally built in a country with no nuclear regulator and no educated workforce), and you just take that cost. Germany would have saved money. If you take into account the cost reduction from building 40-50 plants, its not even close. The simple fact is the fastest most efficent and cheapest de-fossilization ever done has been done with nuclear. We have literal prove that this is true. When all these countries were sitting around formulating the Kyoto protocol, France already had a green grid. P.S: Fukushima killed less people then German coal plants do every year. German coal plants have been systematically murdering the population for centuries, not to mention causing all kinds of health issues, particularly in children. All this ridiculous panic about radioactive mushrooms, despite there not being a single reliable cause of death from that while everybody is having lung issues because of coal. Its just incredible how people who are usually smart and informed on a subject believe all the Greenpeace panic propaganda. Turning of nuclear before coal is a gross criminal act, and the people responsible should be imprisoned.

Morelesshell 3y ago

While i'm slightly surprised by the overall quality of the comments here: It looks really really neat. It looks like something out of a scifi movie and i like big dishes.

Lukas_Skywalker 3y ago

A bit of a tangent, but I think the dishes they are using here were once part of Onyx, a rather large communication interception system [0]. It got famous in 2006 when it intercepted proof of CIA black sites (mentioned in the Wikipedia article as well). Until then, the Swiss public didn't really know the scope of the system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)

gumby 3y ago

> "Former satellite antennas are ideal as solar energy systems," Trackers almost never make economic sense; panels are now so cheap that it is usually cheaper to just take up more area. But when the hardware has already been deployed and then abandoned, this can work. Hence the word "former" in that quote in the article!

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

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