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[Max™]

If you can set up hydroelectric somewhere, neat, you live near a coast and can get one of those new wave-float plants running, awesome. I've got every fan in the house shimmed and lubricated regularly, I would go ham on a damn wind plant spitting out a constant low drone that nobody else seems to hear.

In, er, political news: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-third-presidential-debate-229804

Also, how much area do you need to cover with solar panels before it really starts fucking up the local microclimate? Combine that with solar being a horrible eyesore, and you're pretty much limited to areas nowhere near population centers and of little to no ecologic value.

Some of these exhibit a pleasing sort of aesthetic from certain angles, but it's hard to appreciate how large they really are until you get up close, like about :50 into this video.

[Reelya]

I think a big part of solar being an eyesore, when you consider urban environments isn't actually anything innate in the panels themselves - it's just that the people designing them have zero design sense. They're basically just a dark glass-like material so in theory you can blend that into architecture however you want. Right now we just bolt these ugly slabs onto existing walls and roofs, but there's nothing inherent in the concept or operation of solar panels that requires that.

Some people claim they get sick from wind turbines, but so far, there's no scientific basis for why people would get sick, they're blaming some made-up bullshit basically. Sounds like a placebo-type effect, which occurs when something newfangled is brought in. Such as "fan death" in Korea. A similar one is MSG associated with Chinese food. The "symtpoms" never appear in blind tests of MSG, and people also never report the "MSG symptoms" from food with far higher levels of MSG, which are more familiar, like fastfood pasta.

[Max™]

I don't think anyone seriously discussing solar is thinking about the single panels, that will never be a significant part of the energy production system. Should all rooftops with appropriate exposure be covered with solar electric tiles? Fuck yeah, why not, but even then it's a supplement for all but households that stringently monitor and control and cut their use to an extreme length.

Is that honorable? Sure, but petroleum took over because it was cheap and let us use lots of energy to do neat modern things, like this discussion.

We could totally go all caveman and cut our energy needs, I have lived like that, I like my air conditioning, lights, internet, refrigeration, and so forth.

[Reelya]

For households, people are commonly using 1-1.5 KW system. A typical household would need a 4KW system to be fully self-sufficient for electricity - feeding into the grid during the day, drawing electricity at night, when demand is low, so not much storage needed. Also peak and off-peak pricing will change to match patterns of both use and production, which will further drive consumer patterns to use the existing power efficiently. They basically pay people right now to use more power at night: with solar the incentives will turn around, so it's wrong to look at existing usage patterns to decide how much battery backup we'd need in a 100% solar set-up. We'd have to take into account that power costs in the day would be when prices are cheapest, and they'd become more expensive overnight, which is the opposite of what happens now. Households, but especially heavy commercial users would change their behavior in those circumstances. Higher night prices would cover the needed battery storage, while disincentivizing night-time consumption, so it's a no-brainer that things would compensate pretty quickly for an all-solar world.

So it's not really a big stretch that entire communities are completely self-sufficient from home solar, especially if future systems are more efficient than current. The main thing would be to arrange financing to get the capacity, in a similar way to how we do other types of social insurance.

Additionally, rather than just molten salts or the like to store energy, why not just pump towers full of water? We need to do that anyway, and the water can turn turbines when people get some water. We could couple that with off peak water pricing e.g. at times when power is worth more, you make water a bit cheaper. Companies that need a lot of water are then going to choose to use more at night, which in turn released stored electricity when it's needed.

[Max™]

It would definitely be nicer than having to install big plants like the one in that video I posted everywhere. Just a smaller one of those for a given range, suitable storage and transmission infrastructure, and Gen IV or higher reactors eating nuclear waste would be a good future.

[birdy51]

I think wind energy is slowly moving down more efficient routes than the old large blade model, which would effective neuter most fears of the current model. But I am uncertain of their success...

[mainiac]

You get to quote 20 years for what we should be looking at, but when I bring up moving to nuclear and building more plants over the next 20 years...

And...?

Demand smoothing is a problem that we will have 20 years to work out.  If we make a solar farm today and make a demand smoothing technology or policy choice in 20 years, the demand smoothing problem is taken care of.  This matters because people point to the lack of demand smoothing today as if that proves solar is unviable.  But we dont have demand smoothing today because there is no need for it today.  It isn't a crazy hard thing so we will start doing it when there is need for it.

Nuclear power being economically horrible is a problem that we need to solve before we start construction.  If we pour billions of dollars into a massive concrete housing for a steam generator that money is spent.  We dont get it back if we discover some amazing new nuclear technology (which is itself very unlikely because it's an extremely mature technology).  A nuclear power plant construction we start using todays technology needs to be cost effective compared to technology 20 years down the line.

[sluissa]

What I don't understand is why equatorial countries don't get in on this solar business. Countries in the tropics tend to be some of the most impoverished. They could put up solar farms across their desertified land and all live like Saudi kings selling ebergy to the rest of the world. Mexico is a good candidate as well as large chunks of North Africa

[Neonivek]

What I don't understand is why equatorial countries don't get in on this solar business. Countries in the tropics tend to be some of the most impoverished. They could put up solar farms across their desertified land and all live like Saudi kings selling ebergy to the rest of the world. Mexico is a good candidate as well as large chunks of North Africa

I think you are answering your own questions here.

Also I am not sure if "Tropics" is a good place for solar farms... hmmm...

[mainiac]

Sun is good for solar but heat and weather are bad.

[Culise]

What I don't understand is why equatorial countries don't get in on this solar business. Countries in the tropics tend to be some of the most impoverished. They could put up solar farms across their desertified land and all live like Saudi kings selling ebergy to the rest of the world. Mexico is a good candidate as well as large chunks of North Africa

I think you are answering your own questions here.

Also I am not sure if "Tropics" is a good place for solar farms... hmmm...

Plus, energy transmission losses.  Long power lines are huge sinks for power as increasing wire length means that line resistance soars; this is actually a significant problem in the rural US.  You also need to maintain those lines once built; power losses also arise when wiring, capacitors, and transformers in the network degrade.  It's easy to carry power in the form of oil, coal, or uranium.  We can't quite do the same with batteries, yet, which goes back to the issues mentioned above about storage.  If you generate the power there, you're going to be using the power somewhere in the vicinity.  That works for Mexico, which happens to have a first-rate economy right next door (albeit with the caveat that it's still cheaper just for said first-rate economy to build power plants locally rather than across the border).  It doesn't work nearly so well for the Sahel, which isn't going to be stringing up power lines to Europe any time soon.

[alway]

Honestly I have no idea how wind has this unnatural great reputation.

But hopefully people are a bit more realistic now that people are actually trying wind...

Basically when they started doing a serious wind power initiative they thought it was "silent" (like it was a pinwheel) but wind generators produce a lot of noise, break catastrophically, and require regular maintenance... So lets just say a lot of people were annoyed when they found they were 400 feet from one.

You seem to be very anti-wind, and I can't figure out why. At typical distances, they're quieter than an AC unit or fridge ( http://www.gereports.com/post/92442325225/how-loud-is-a-wind-turbine/ ), and are generally placed in the middle of farm fields or similar sparsely populated areas, where they're basically disrupting nothing.

[sluissa]

Transportation of fossil fuels isn't exactly cheap either. Put as much engineering effort into low resistance conductors as you do the pipelines at run from Canada to the Gulf and you'd likely have that issue taken care of. Storage is another matter, but as someone else said. Large solar can load balance and store to some extent with things like molten salt storage.

[mainiac]

Wikileaks in a nutshell

Transportation of fossil fuels isn't exactly cheap either. Put as much engineering effort into low resistance conductors as you do the pipelines at run from Canada to the Gulf and you'd likely have that issue taken care of. Storage is another matter, but as someone else said. Large solar can load balance and store to some extent with things like molten salt storage.

If we are banking on emerging technologies then lets bank on microwave power transmission
1) It would lead to space colonization
2) It would save tons of infrastructure money
3) It would be super flexible in the face of natural disasters or terror plots

[martinuzz]

Solar power in the Sahara isn't feasible because of the security costs involved. You don't want to have to station a batallion for every 10 Gigawatt of solar power to prevent your panels from being scavenged for scrap metal by locals.