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There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems t
by sampullman 2y ago
There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.
- dv_dt 2y agoSolar farms don't take a huge amount of space. The roof tops of the chip factories are probably a perfectly fine place to augment the chip factory electric use
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoHello "augment" I see you've been doing some heavy lifting lately, looking good.
- Retric 2y agoSolar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed. However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.
- XorNot 2y agoA chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.
- Retric 2y agoYou can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else. France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
- bobthepanda 2y agoFrance covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Retric 2y agoWhich suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them. At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure28_nuke_france_dailyunavailabilities2021.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
- bobthepanda 2y agoThat’s probably more of an artefact of France building exact copies of the same design within a relatively short timeframe (ten years) so they all shared the exact same design flaws and started showing their age at the same time
- Retric 2y agoThus ‘ramping up’ is a problem. If they want to replace 5% of their electric grid per decade with nuclear then it’s not an issue but that’s not going to solve short term issues. Go a lot faster and they trade short term problems for longer term issues.
- franckl 2y agoThere are 56 reactors in France, they never went offline at the same time. It happened that half went offline but no more than that
- Retric 2y ago
- thatsit 2y agoEver heard of „battery storage“?
- Panzer04 2y agoI find people generally underestimate the generation capacity of solar, both per cost and per area. A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.
- silisili 2y agoYou mentioned offshore wind, is offshore solar not a thing? Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them...easier than floating a giant windmill, at least.
- pvaldes 2y agoChina would find an excuse to attack anything put in "their" sea.
- huac 2y agoshouldn't there be more clouds over ocean, as that is where the clouds tend to form?
- metaphor 2y ago> Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1]. [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-0477_1999_080_0067_tatcua_2_0_co_2.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...
- gomerspiles 2y agoGeo location aside, putting things off shore is really a way to drive up cost such as maintenance like mad and it makes even less sense when you are working with large surfaces rather than something designed around having height and wind tolerance.
- churchill 2y ago100KM² of panels (10GW) will generate 22,000 GWh, or roughly 10% of Taiwan's current electricity demand. That is, a 10KM * 10KM field (not necessarily all in on place) that takes up just 0.3% of the island is all you need. Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it. If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.
- wkat4242 2y agoWould they be able to procure that many panels from China when they know they'll end up in Taiwan though?
- churchill 2y agoTaiwan's money spends just as good as anyone's money. That's why Europe is still burning Russian gas while in a proxy war that's seen hundreds of thousands killed. It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.
- generic92034 2y ago> It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics. So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
- diogocp 2y agoBecause they weren't getting paid in "perfectly good money" (they were getting paid into frozen EU bank accounts).
- ArnoVW 2y agoAm I wrong to say that north stream 1 & 2 were put out of commission and Europe procures it’s gaz now via LNG that flows via the huge terminals that were built after 2022? The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.
- foobarian 2y agoI love that Taiwan has 20 peaks over 3km. Such a small island for that kind of geography!