4 ms·

You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts, due to peak demand being during cold winters and just less sun in general? Solar is great in the south where

You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts, due to peak demand being during cold winters and just less sun in general? Solar is great in the south where peak demand is during the warm sunny summers.

standardUser 2y ago
Some like a transmission issue, not an electricity generation issue.
- autoexecbat 2y ago
  Some transmission issues are solved by local generation
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Jensson 2y ago
  How would transmission solve the massive electricity demand during cold winter nights? Even in more southern areas generation during winter is lower, then pay the massive loss of transmitting that so far north and it is no longer viable.
  - kragen 2y ago
    hvdc transmission doesn't have massive losses from transmitting long distances, so you could literally transmit power from the tropics or even the other hemisphere. but overprovisioning solar locally is probably cheaper
    - wait_a_minute 2y ago
      Are there hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances? How much raw material and upkeep does that require? If over-provisioning solar, how much more surface area would be needed to have the solar? Seems like the additional costs would pile up to get to current energy needs being met by just solar.
      - kragen 2y ago
        you'll probably be interested in reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current. it says typical losses are 3.5% per 1000km, and typical voltages are 100–800 kilovolts, but china built a 12-gigawatt 1100-kilovolt link over 3300km in 02019 unfortunately i don't have a good handle on how efficient that link is. the numbers above suggest it would be about 89% efficient, but those are for lower-voltage systems in general you expect the resistive losses in the cables, at a given diameter and power, to scale with the inverse square of the voltage, so an 1100-kilovolt link should have 47% less resistive losses than an 800-kilovolt link at the same power level running over the same cables. however, corona-discharge losses increase at higher voltages rather than decreasing, and i don't know which one is dominant. so i don't know if that link is closer to 89% efficient or closer to 95% efficient the distance from the north or south pole to the equator is of course 10000 km, but people don't build very near the poles. for example, from svalbard to algiers is 4700 km. so, yeah, there are hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances, but not quite that far yet transmission lines require utterly insignificant quantities of raw material, but where they cut through forested terrain, they do require upkeep. in the meeting of a tree and a megavolt, neither one comes out unscathed for some calculations on how much you need to over-provision solar, see my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 considering a counterfactual where somehow norway had to use solar. 6.1 average kilowatts per norwegian at a capacity factor of 6% works out to 102 kilowatts peak per norwegian. if you're using low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels (as i assumed you would in my cost estimate, even though mostly people spring for the more efficient 'mainstream' ones) that would require 635 kilowatts of sunlight per norwegian, which is 635 square meters per norwegian (we rate solar panels on the assumption that sunlight is 1000 watts per square meter). 635 square meters is 25 meters square, .000635 square kilometers per norwegian. multiplying that by 5.5 million norwegians gives you the truly immense area of 3500 square kilometers of solar panels but wait! that's not all! you can't just lay the panels out flat on the ground and expect them to get a 6% capacity factor. you have to angle them toward the equator and spread them out so they don't shade each other. oslo is at 60° north, so your panels need to be angled at 60° from the horizontal, toward the south. maybe a bit more if you want to increase power production in winter, say 69°. so you have to space them out by 1/cos 69° ≈ 2.8. so actually you need 9800 square kilometers for your €340 billion of solar panels. how much space will you have left? a lot, it turns out. norway is 385000 square kilometers, so this is still just 2.5% of the country so norway, despite being the #2 highest user of energy per capita in the world after canada, and having cities that are literally inside the arctic circle, could switch to all solar. it's totally feasible. fortunately they have plenty of hydropower and wind so they don't need to
- Heston 2y ago
  It's definitely a generation issue. When there's no sun(overcast, nighttime) there's no energy. This doesn't even factor in solars quick deterioration from peak performance and the cost of the panels and environment damage from producing them.
  - wait_a_minute 2y ago
    Yeah, I think people looking at just the upfront cost are not really acknowledging or addressing that solar panel installations degrade faster than a nuclear reactor. They also take up more space and as you mentioned will likely end up causing more damage to produce at planetary scale. They are definitely great when coupled with batteries for many use cases including decentralizing aspects of the grid for residential and smaller scale usages, but the raw performance of nuclear is impressive and exciting. So little inputs needed for how much you get, and for how long too. There are old reactors still producing after over 50 years…that is mind-boggling. Who knows how far the tech can be pushed with modern advancements and less blockers on developing the technology further. It should be in the toolbox as part of a strategy for renewable energy needs on Earth and beyond.
    - kragen 2y ago
      nuclear energy is very exciting and absolutely crucial for space exploration, but not economically competitive with solar in the foreseeable future on earth's surface there are also solar panels still producing power after 50 years; they do degrade a little, especially in the first ten years, but the 20–30 year panel lifetimes you see published are more of a warranty and accounting issue than anything else. (of course some panels crack or yellow within a year or two) it's true that solar farms take up a lot of space, but even in high-density countries like japan there is room for them. singapore might have a problem tho
      - wait_a_minute 2y ago
        What would surface area needs be like for over-provisioning needs in the US? What if we want to scale energy production by 2x or 10x or 100x for advanced industrial and commercial usage needs in the future? I think then the solar panel approach becomes limited on earth. You’re right that the panels don’t degrade a ton. I read online that after 20-30 years they might drop 15% efficiency. For residential usage that might be okay, but it does mean needing upkeep and worrying about baseline potential dropping, which in some climates could be bad. I do think a combination of the technologies is best, since scaling up energy production will be simpler and easier and more resource-friendly with nuclear than with more solar. Moving up the Kardashev scale will require capturing all the energy that can be captured from all sources so why let any go to waste. :)
- loeg 2y ago
  In that transmission is very expensive and inefficient in ways that are challenging to improve because of physics? Transmission isn't getting a lot better very quickly, and certainly not by waving a magic wand.
  - kragen 2y ago
    transmission is in fact getting a lot better very quickly, becoming much less inefficient, because people rose to the challenge; i took some notes about recent hvdc systems in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725189
kragen 2y ago
i edited that into my comment while you were writing yours, yeah. norway and finland have capacity factors of 6% for solar (compared to 30% here and 21% in the usa) and north of the arctic circle you'd need enough batteries to power you all winter long (though if i did my calculations correctly, it turns out that total yearly insolation rises after you cross the arctic circle) this is why scandinavian countries are using a lot more hydro and wind than solar. wind and especially hydro are cheaper even than solar, but wind and especially hydro are much more limited resources still, consider a counterfactual where somehow norway had to satisfy all its energy demand from solar. they burn 78.8 million barrels of oil per year, which is 15.3 gigawatts. they consume 124.29 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is 14.18 gigawatts (already over 95% hydro and wind, with no significant nuclear or solar component). they burn 3.98 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, which at .0364 megajoules per liter is 4.59 gigawatts. all of these together (assuming no overlap) are 34.1 gigawatts, and over 5.55 million norwegians, that's 6.1 kilowatts per norwegian. (if that sounds like a lot more than your house uses, that's probably more because most of it is used by transport and heavy industry than because norwegians have to heat their houses more.) 34 gigawatts divided by a 6% capacity factor is 570 gigawatts of solar cell nameplate capacity you'd need. at 02021 german costs of €0.60 per (nameplate, peak) watt of utility-scale solar, (including modules, inverters, permitting, inspection, customer acquisition, etc.; see slide 48 of the fraunhofer deck linked above) this would cost €340 billion, about 8 months of norway's gdp. if you could only spend 5% of their gdp on the transition, you could get it done in about 15 years, maybe 25 if you need batteries of course it's unnecessary because norway is already renewables-powered! but my point is that solar cells are now so cheap that they're a viable power source even in ridiculously polar countries. incidentally, they now cost half what they did in 02021, so the price would be a lot less now antarctica is much more interesting than the arctic, though, since there's land there
- jaggederest 2y ago
  Just curious where "here" is. South Africa?
  - kragen 2y ago
    sorry, argentina
bruce511 2y ago
I'd agree. Clearly solar is sun-dependent, and other options may be more suited to other locations. That said, electricity is one form of energy that is really cheap to distribute (once you are close to "the grid".) Which means that moving electricity from sunny places to darker corners is very practical. There are some economics in play. Remote populations (like on islands, or in Alaska) are unlikely to be connected anytime soon. These populations are generally dependent on coal. Nuclear might be appealing, but refueling nuclear takes time. So if it's your only electrical source, you need two reactors, each capable of supplying enough power. And of course the expertise to run it (expertise possibly harder to find in far-north Alaska.) Ultimately diesel is likely to remain the fuel of choice for small communities because engines are cheap, fuel is easily transported, and expertise is local.
- mlindner 2y ago
  I think you're underestimating the costs of transporting power long distances.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    There are losses, sure. And yes it requires infrastructure to be built. Unlike an oil pipeline there's no possibility of spilling, or blocking wildlife. And the costs are tiny compared to trucking oil or coal around.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Refueling is why you build more capacity than you need. It’s not like you have to “refuel” every night. It’s also not 1 for 1 (1 running, 1 “waiting”)
  - bruce511 2y ago
    It kinda is though because refueling is a long job. Typically in the order of weeks. I'm not sure most communities would enjoy running on no power, or limited power for some number of weeks every couple years. And sure, maybe "fast refueling " gets built into new designs. A day or two is likely the longest you can tolerate though. Obviously that's before we consider other concerns of being dependent on a single source. I'm not sure living in remote Alaska, being dependent on a single complex machine for power is an ideal situation.
njovin 2y ago
Even in the southwest this is a problem - peak output from residential rooftop solar is mid-day but peak demand is early evening when people are getting home, cooking dinner, charging their EVs, etc. Without some major changes to residential storage or large grid-attached storage systems, solar alone isn't going to cut it.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Don't get confused by peak net-demand i.e. demand that is left after you subtract solar. The newly cheap midday power should be driving demand towards that time period but it won't show up on net demand charts, which will show the famous duck curve belly at that time. That doesn't mean people aren't using energy at that time. In fact the main way to detect this demand shift in a net demand graph is to see that the evening peaks are dropping year over year, even as they seem relatively larger compared with net demand when solar is working. But anyway, in California the massive deployment of batteries in the last few years has already solved this problem. Compared with peaking gas plants that only run once a day for a few hours batteries are both cheap and clean.
Gibbon1 2y ago
The bulk of humanity lives between 45 north latitude and 15 south latitude. http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-latitude.html http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat...
grecy 2y ago
> You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts I lived in the Yukon for 4 years, would drive many hours due south to get to the capital of Alaska. I met dozens of people that had off-grid houses powered entirely by solar. Remember the sun is up for 20+ hours a day in summer. In winter they had to be careful, but the had full houses with washing machines, fridges, etc. etc. This was in 2015 when people had lead acid batteries and only a few kW of panels. I bet it's much more common now.

standardUser 2y ago

Some like a transmission issue, not an electricity generation issue.

autoexecbat 2y ago
Some transmission issues are solved by local generation
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Jensson 2y ago
How would transmission solve the massive electricity demand during cold winter nights? Even in more southern areas generation during winter is lower, then pay the massive loss of transmitting that so far north and it is no longer viable.
- kragen 2y ago
  hvdc transmission doesn't have massive losses from transmitting long distances, so you could literally transmit power from the tropics or even the other hemisphere. but overprovisioning solar locally is probably cheaper
  - wait_a_minute 2y ago
    Are there hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances? How much raw material and upkeep does that require? If over-provisioning solar, how much more surface area would be needed to have the solar? Seems like the additional costs would pile up to get to current energy needs being met by just solar.
    - kragen 2y ago
      you'll probably be interested in reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current. it says typical losses are 3.5% per 1000km, and typical voltages are 100–800 kilovolts, but china built a 12-gigawatt 1100-kilovolt link over 3300km in 02019 unfortunately i don't have a good handle on how efficient that link is. the numbers above suggest it would be about 89% efficient, but those are for lower-voltage systems in general you expect the resistive losses in the cables, at a given diameter and power, to scale with the inverse square of the voltage, so an 1100-kilovolt link should have 47% less resistive losses than an 800-kilovolt link at the same power level running over the same cables. however, corona-discharge losses increase at higher voltages rather than decreasing, and i don't know which one is dominant. so i don't know if that link is closer to 89% efficient or closer to 95% efficient the distance from the north or south pole to the equator is of course 10000 km, but people don't build very near the poles. for example, from svalbard to algiers is 4700 km. so, yeah, there are hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances, but not quite that far yet transmission lines require utterly insignificant quantities of raw material, but where they cut through forested terrain, they do require upkeep. in the meeting of a tree and a megavolt, neither one comes out unscathed for some calculations on how much you need to over-provision solar, see my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 considering a counterfactual where somehow norway had to use solar. 6.1 average kilowatts per norwegian at a capacity factor of 6% works out to 102 kilowatts peak per norwegian. if you're using low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels (as i assumed you would in my cost estimate, even though mostly people spring for the more efficient 'mainstream' ones) that would require 635 kilowatts of sunlight per norwegian, which is 635 square meters per norwegian (we rate solar panels on the assumption that sunlight is 1000 watts per square meter). 635 square meters is 25 meters square, .000635 square kilometers per norwegian. multiplying that by 5.5 million norwegians gives you the truly immense area of 3500 square kilometers of solar panels but wait! that's not all! you can't just lay the panels out flat on the ground and expect them to get a 6% capacity factor. you have to angle them toward the equator and spread them out so they don't shade each other. oslo is at 60° north, so your panels need to be angled at 60° from the horizontal, toward the south. maybe a bit more if you want to increase power production in winter, say 69°. so you have to space them out by 1/cos 69° ≈ 2.8. so actually you need 9800 square kilometers for your €340 billion of solar panels. how much space will you have left? a lot, it turns out. norway is 385000 square kilometers, so this is still just 2.5% of the country so norway, despite being the #2 highest user of energy per capita in the world after canada, and having cities that are literally inside the arctic circle, could switch to all solar. it's totally feasible. fortunately they have plenty of hydropower and wind so they don't need to
Heston 2y ago
It's definitely a generation issue. When there's no sun(overcast, nighttime) there's no energy. This doesn't even factor in solars quick deterioration from peak performance and the cost of the panels and environment damage from producing them.
- wait_a_minute 2y ago
  Yeah, I think people looking at just the upfront cost are not really acknowledging or addressing that solar panel installations degrade faster than a nuclear reactor. They also take up more space and as you mentioned will likely end up causing more damage to produce at planetary scale. They are definitely great when coupled with batteries for many use cases including decentralizing aspects of the grid for residential and smaller scale usages, but the raw performance of nuclear is impressive and exciting. So little inputs needed for how much you get, and for how long too. There are old reactors still producing after over 50 years…that is mind-boggling. Who knows how far the tech can be pushed with modern advancements and less blockers on developing the technology further. It should be in the toolbox as part of a strategy for renewable energy needs on Earth and beyond.
  - kragen 2y ago
    nuclear energy is very exciting and absolutely crucial for space exploration, but not economically competitive with solar in the foreseeable future on earth's surface there are also solar panels still producing power after 50 years; they do degrade a little, especially in the first ten years, but the 20–30 year panel lifetimes you see published are more of a warranty and accounting issue than anything else. (of course some panels crack or yellow within a year or two) it's true that solar farms take up a lot of space, but even in high-density countries like japan there is room for them. singapore might have a problem tho
    - wait_a_minute 2y ago
      What would surface area needs be like for over-provisioning needs in the US? What if we want to scale energy production by 2x or 10x or 100x for advanced industrial and commercial usage needs in the future? I think then the solar panel approach becomes limited on earth. You’re right that the panels don’t degrade a ton. I read online that after 20-30 years they might drop 15% efficiency. For residential usage that might be okay, but it does mean needing upkeep and worrying about baseline potential dropping, which in some climates could be bad. I do think a combination of the technologies is best, since scaling up energy production will be simpler and easier and more resource-friendly with nuclear than with more solar. Moving up the Kardashev scale will require capturing all the energy that can be captured from all sources so why let any go to waste. :)
loeg 2y ago
In that transmission is very expensive and inefficient in ways that are challenging to improve because of physics? Transmission isn't getting a lot better very quickly, and certainly not by waving a magic wand.
- kragen 2y ago
  transmission is in fact getting a lot better very quickly, becoming much less inefficient, because people rose to the challenge; i took some notes about recent hvdc systems in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725189

kragen 2y ago

i edited that into my comment while you were writing yours, yeah. norway and finland have capacity factors of 6% for solar (compared to 30% here and 21% in the usa) and north of the arctic circle you'd need enough batteries to power you all winter long (though if i did my calculations correctly, it turns out that total yearly insolation rises after you cross the arctic circle) this is why scandinavian countries are using a lot more hydro and wind than solar. wind and especially hydro are cheaper even than solar, but wind and especially hydro are much more limited resources still, consider a counterfactual where somehow norway had to satisfy all its energy demand from solar. they burn 78.8 million barrels of oil per year, which is 15.3 gigawatts. they consume 124.29 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is 14.18 gigawatts (already over 95% hydro and wind, with no significant nuclear or solar component). they burn 3.98 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, which at .0364 megajoules per liter is 4.59 gigawatts. all of these together (assuming no overlap) are 34.1 gigawatts, and over 5.55 million norwegians, that's 6.1 kilowatts per norwegian. (if that sounds like a lot more than your house uses, that's probably more because most of it is used by transport and heavy industry than because norwegians have to heat their houses more.) 34 gigawatts divided by a 6% capacity factor is 570 gigawatts of solar cell nameplate capacity you'd need. at 02021 german costs of €0.60 per (nameplate, peak) watt of utility-scale solar, (including modules, inverters, permitting, inspection, customer acquisition, etc.; see slide 48 of the fraunhofer deck linked above) this would cost €340 billion, about 8 months of norway's gdp. if you could only spend 5% of their gdp on the transition, you could get it done in about 15 years, maybe 25 if you need batteries of course it's unnecessary because norway is already renewables-powered! but my point is that solar cells are now so cheap that they're a viable power source even in ridiculously polar countries. incidentally, they now cost half what they did in 02021, so the price would be a lot less now antarctica is much more interesting than the arctic, though, since there's land there

jaggederest 2y ago
Just curious where "here" is. South Africa?
- kragen 2y ago
  sorry, argentina

bruce511 2y ago

I'd agree. Clearly solar is sun-dependent, and other options may be more suited to other locations. That said, electricity is one form of energy that is really cheap to distribute (once you are close to "the grid".) Which means that moving electricity from sunny places to darker corners is very practical. There are some economics in play. Remote populations (like on islands, or in Alaska) are unlikely to be connected anytime soon. These populations are generally dependent on coal. Nuclear might be appealing, but refueling nuclear takes time. So if it's your only electrical source, you need two reactors, each capable of supplying enough power. And of course the expertise to run it (expertise possibly harder to find in far-north Alaska.) Ultimately diesel is likely to remain the fuel of choice for small communities because engines are cheap, fuel is easily transported, and expertise is local.

mlindner 2y ago
I think you're underestimating the costs of transporting power long distances.
- bruce511 2y ago
  There are losses, sure. And yes it requires infrastructure to be built. Unlike an oil pipeline there's no possibility of spilling, or blocking wildlife. And the costs are tiny compared to trucking oil or coal around.
EasyMark 2y ago
Refueling is why you build more capacity than you need. It’s not like you have to “refuel” every night. It’s also not 1 for 1 (1 running, 1 “waiting”)
- bruce511 2y ago
  It kinda is though because refueling is a long job. Typically in the order of weeks. I'm not sure most communities would enjoy running on no power, or limited power for some number of weeks every couple years. And sure, maybe "fast refueling " gets built into new designs. A day or two is likely the longest you can tolerate though. Obviously that's before we consider other concerns of being dependent on a single source. I'm not sure living in remote Alaska, being dependent on a single complex machine for power is an ideal situation.

njovin 2y ago

Even in the southwest this is a problem - peak output from residential rooftop solar is mid-day but peak demand is early evening when people are getting home, cooking dinner, charging their EVs, etc. Without some major changes to residential storage or large grid-attached storage systems, solar alone isn't going to cut it.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Don't get confused by peak net-demand i.e. demand that is left after you subtract solar. The newly cheap midday power should be driving demand towards that time period but it won't show up on net demand charts, which will show the famous duck curve belly at that time. That doesn't mean people aren't using energy at that time. In fact the main way to detect this demand shift in a net demand graph is to see that the evening peaks are dropping year over year, even as they seem relatively larger compared with net demand when solar is working. But anyway, in California the massive deployment of batteries in the last few years has already solved this problem. Compared with peaking gas plants that only run once a day for a few hours batteries are both cheap and clean.

Gibbon1 2y ago

The bulk of humanity lives between 45 north latitude and 15 south latitude. http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-latitude.html http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat...

grecy 2y ago

> You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts I lived in the Yukon for 4 years, would drive many hours due south to get to the capital of Alaska. I met dozens of people that had off-grid houses powered entirely by solar. Remember the sun is up for 20+ hours a day in summer. In winter they had to be careful, but the had full houses with washing machines, fridges, etc. etc. This was in 2015 when people had lead acid batteries and only a few kW of panels. I bet it's much more common now.