Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
What about the required raw materials to fabricate the solar panels? What about aging and recycling rate?
I don’t say, abandon solar power. I say: improve the recycling rate of the panels. Dual use agricultural land, maybe try to take advantage of the panel’s properties for agricultural land use (shadows cast by the panels, wind erosion idk).
And maybe evaluate where cars for personal transportation are really needed and how the fuel efficiency could be raised.
Mass transportation complemented by bike and scooter rentals - it’s mostly an infrastructural change, which leads to reduced fuel consumption.
Car sharing: One could aim to increase the frequency of use per vehicle - less cars to build, less space required for parking lots and streets.
I hope this is only to put things in perspectives because cars suck for a multitude of other reasons, however we power them.
We can use solar energy to move a box that weighs 1/2 tons around, for every individual on the planet. The cars will still shed microplastics. The cars will still require paved parking lots that are not permeable, worsening floods, and generate heat islands. The cars will still kill one or two billion animals every year. The cars will still kill about a million people worldwide every year; one every 30 seconds.
It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.
Here’s a whole article on agrovoltaics. IIRC, they require less water because of the shade. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agrivoltaics-pairing-solar-power-and-agriculture-northwest
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn’t even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
I think if we just tax vehicles at the rate they destroy the road, we’d quickly see folks stop having giant vehicles. Set the standard as a bicycle (and be unreasonable about the weight, so 25kg), and then use the lovely X^4 function to determine how much to tax.
A bicycle (and let’s just say the average person is 100kg, and added to the bicycle’s weight, to be unreasonable again) costs $0.50 to register… while the f350 (found a weight for the lightest around 6000 lbs, or 2721.5kg) should be about $0.50 * (2721.5kg/125kg)^4 = $112347.47. I think that would do just fine. Maybe we could adjust down a little, so the bike could be $0.05, and the truck $11234.75.
Yes, but that makes sense. Don’t you know that’s not allowed?! /s
I know… and I also know that we currently depend on truck rigs for shipping in everything, so the taxes would ultimately focus on them MUCH MORE than even the assholes in their coal rollers. That would mean the ‘punishing’ factor of the taxation would be diluted for them, even if we used GCWR of a vehicle as the standard for taxing.
Sadly, this isn’t a “the market can handle it” thing either. Gas stations have underground tanks which have to be dug up and disposed of before the land can be used again, and it’s expensive. So gasoline infrastructure will remain for a while regardless of how many gas powered vehicles there are.
We have fuel tanker trucks and rail cars already. Could we not run a similar arrangement with batteries on a truck or train car?
Batteries carry a lot less energy per kilogram, so transporting them uses more energy than transporting biofuels. You also have to carry empty batteries back to the source rather than it being a one way trip. It could be feasible on rails, but those are two major limitations compared to just running some big cables over land. The weight problem also means that some amount of combustible fuel will always be necessary, since batteries and aviation are not compatible.
For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
We really should be looking more into reducing car dependency as well.
If you’re driving a car every day, you’re the problem
Good strategy, blame individuals for systemic problems lol
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
All it takes is political willpower and courage to change stuff for the better, we (humanity) are smart enough to find solutions, we just don’t have the courage, right now and do stupid things out of fear (like voting for people who claim to give security but do only more fear mongering only to sell more security measures that don’t solve any problems long term)
Just like mayor fisk
No thanks, we prefer to vote for people who blame immigrants for all problems we are told we have.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Yup, which I’ve been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
We have variable pricing available here, the problem there is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.
“very long time” here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it’ll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we’re putting biofuel on a truck, it’s worth considering. I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we’re making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there’s no incentive to switch.
I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
Oh yeah, it’s inefficient as hell. But energy from the sun is coming to us whether we harvest it or not. It’s unlimited. The limitation is solar cells.
We’re at the point where we’ve basically run out of easy oil to access, and we’re coming up with bigger and deeper drilling methods. We spend billions on a single offshore rig that will function for 10-20 years at most.
The issue isn’t efficiency, it’s profit motive.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are “counted” different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it’s needed?
I think people forget that if we build enough solar, we’ll have such an energy surplus that it’ll be essentially free to electrify stuff and use that energy.
Losses from transformation and transmission go away as soon as the resource is unlimited.
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Yes, we should continue to install solar, and the needed batteries or other storage methods. But, the future is fusion and geothermal. Geothermal development is making steady progress, in part by piggy backing on the fracking methods developed for oil. I expect geothermal to become widely adopted before fusion is ready. Or, at least it would be if people in power stopped ignoring it. It’s cheaper, and there are no big issues that we can’t see a clear path toward solving with current engineering knowledge.
The problem is geothermal is very limited by location and fusion is still decades away. We need both to contribute but one will always be an insignificant percentage and the other will be too late: we need to get carbon neutral faster than fusion can help us get there
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
when the sun doesn’t shines you are usually supposed to go to sleep
In Ireland that’s most days… 😉☘️
Any idea how much it would cost?
Big part of the cost could probably be planned over like 20 years too.
LCoE is a partial metric at best, it tells you nothing about how useful the energy is produced. For comparison a nuclear bomb produces an LCoE of about ~30cents/kwh but that doesnt make it a good energy source to power a grid with.
When you are adding intermittent sources to a most despatchable grid, sure LCoE tells you most of what you need to know, as displaced more expensive sources just throttle down slightly. But once you get into significant fractions of energy (~1/3 or more) just having expected joules created / cost to build is not a particularly useful metric for an intermittent power generator.
At least I’m the US, those crops are heavily subsidized so they could subsidize solar instead…
Their right, in the sense of square acres.
Get ready for a rant.
Except it doesn’t work that way and it isn’t that simple, the article pokes a big hole in its own argument in the second sentence, the world, it’s spread out across the world. The crop land used for biofuel is hundreds or thousands of miles way from where the electricity would need to get to. The farmers would have nothing to farm and they would have to give up or lease their land to electric companies or the government. The entire infrastructure for utilities and farming would need to be torn down and rebuilt, it wouldn’t be practical for at least 2 generations once construction started, in that time we could be using a completely different form of fuel making solar obsolete.
The problem isn’t where to put panels but how to get electricity to the electric cars that are thousands of miles away from the farms and the farms are many miles from each other. Plus biofuels will never go away and we’ll need significant quantities for at least another hundred years.
Use old landfills or old quarries or building rooftops, their a lot closer to the cities. Why not use the windows of the buildings for thermal energy. Why not use the energy from our heating and cooling and plumbing systems to generate electricity. Plus we can do them all at the same time, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, put a windmill and solar panels and thermal on the same rooftop. Put steam turbines everywhere.
Why? Because basic engineering will tell you that small areas of low quality waste heat isn’t something you turn into usable energy.
That’s the one sentence out of thay post I didn’t agree with a well.
It’s almost as if @[email protected] doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about and is saying complete nonsense.
Bah hahaha you got me there… didn’t you
Damn, twin. That’s a great rebuke you got there.
As another commentator points out, transportation of electricity and vehicles themselves are the major problems. Farmers that grow biofuels could conceivably shift to another crop, and many of the crops used for biofuels are routinely farmed for other uses (e.g., corn is animal feed and biofuel feed). In that regard, I disagree with the the argument that the entire infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.
the problem of getting electricity to cars is removed if we have better public transportation, though developing that infrastructure and reconfiguring the existing system (e.g., car-centric) is a much bigger problem. Regardless, you can still use solar for other uses (houses, industry) while you convert transportation slowly (and painfully, as we’ve really painted ourselves into a corner).
I do* like your take on alternate land uses for quarries (and mines! don’t forget those). Not all mines are close to cities, but some are. There’s a few really good example of mines installing solar panels on their reclaimed tailings storage facilities., or old mines being used for pumped hydro batteries.
The energy issue is multifaceted, and while it’s easy to say ‘just do nuclear’ ‘just do solar’ ‘just do hydro’, one size doesn’t fit all. However, the one thing that DOES fit, is how we have to start thinking about how to repurpose what we have already (e.g., windows as you point out) to suit our objectives of green energy.
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie’s where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
If you write movie’s, why don’t you also write author’s?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It’s a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
You couldn’t come up with a less efficient form of solar power if you tried. It’s there to subsidize US farmers.
brazil produces more biofuel iirc
That may be. But as a percentage of farm income, the prices that corn (and soybeans to an extent) demands is driven by biofuel mandates within the US. If the only market was food and export, those prices would be substantially lower.
meaning what
Meaning that in the US biofuels are a very inefficient way of giving corn growers subsidies. That’s why congress has supported various biofuel requirements.
They’ve also cut down a lot of rain forests to do it.
no, the rainforests cut go majority to cattle ranching
It’s been great traveling the world and seeing more and more solar installations. There is a long tail for things like aviation and plenty of chemistry but the world is changing. It would be nice if less governments were voted in that were anti the transition but progress is still being made
While that is technically true, that is not the best use for that land, nor is it a good way to setup solar.
The size of Germany, Poland, Finland, or Italy
😄
First, pretty weird to go with 4 examples
Second, those 4 are of VASTLY different sizes by “my country isn’t one of the 5 largest in the world” standards. The difference in size between Germany and Italy is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
Third, even IF those countries were roughly the same size, they’re of such disparate shapes that the comparison would STILL be pretty much useless as a reference point to most people.
is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
I chuckled. Weird comparison usage should be embraced! :D
you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.
that and biofuels only land could produce the same as existing global electricity demand are bigger takeaways.
Article undersells the 7000twh of existing car+truck energy. With just 75% efficiency for solar panel to EV wheel, just 2366twh of solar would replace the ICE twh to wheel equivalent fuel consumption. So, the land conversion formula allows for 10x the number of cars and trucks. Even H2 electrolysis would permit 7x the number of cars and trucks (ensuring lighter trucks/cars as well) from biofuels land.
Saddly 75% is still a pipe dream, lucky to get 40% from panel to road. Not that biofuel is not one of if not the worst use of land mind you.
The DC-AC-DC conversion loop does cost 15% or so. LiFePo batteries (better than NMC) 10%, and motor 10-15%. AC grid transmission losses add more.
With home solar, DC charging (hopefully bidirectional), 75%-80% efficiency to the wheel. But sure, AC grid tied charging could drop it by 20%. Still better than 60% losses.
Comparing to ICE engines, its fair to exclude transmission losses (exists in both. about 5%), and there is regen available for EV, and it doesn’t idle. My original 75% claim may be too generous, but 3x efficiency of ICE is still fair.
Evs are 75% to 90% efficient from their battery, but the real issue is solar on the grid. Its way more then 20% loss from the grid, hell 40% loss in transmission is normal around here, and that’s just last run. The issue is that its loss on every step. I think local solar is the way to go for ev charging but this is clearly about mass deployment and that means the grid.
But what would happen to the sunlight? Y’all are just trying to kill the sun!!!
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
It’s not an inefficient way to turn political donations into federal subsidies though, and that’s the real point of it. It’s horribly inefficient, worse pollution, worse mileage, takes as much energy to make as they get from it, leads to overuse of chemicals that get everywhere, and raises food prices.
None of that matters a whit, because it turns donations to lawmakers into huge subsidies to agribusiness, the majority of which get claimed by the few remaining gatekeeping conglomerates in the agricultural sector.
