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We're going to need a lot of solar panels

• zackmorris 4y ago
  Here is a similar project that generates kerosene and diesel from water and carbon dioxide by using a ceria-based redox reaction to convert them into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas): https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/ https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/ The plant created 5191 liters (1371 gallons) of syngas in 9 days, whereas a Boeing 787 Dreamliner carries 126,372 liters (36,384 gallons). The conversions are not linear, but that is something like a refueled plane every 219 days, give or take an order of magnitude. Looks like the conversion efficiency is 4% but 20% is expected after recycling heat and catalyst improvements. I find stuff like this simultaneously inspiring and devastating. The technology has arrived to easily create our own electricity and fuel without having to deal with supply chain issues around centralized photovoltaic manufacturers, yet the size of the challenge is insurmountable. There is simply no way to scale this big enough to save the natural world before global warming destroys it at the end of the century. So, that leaves us with nuclear power (fission). I appreciate that a lot of people have worked very hard on it and have humanity's best interests at heart. But they don't understand human psychology. We all know that we've been lied to about the safety of nuclear power, but they pretend that it can be made safe. While simultaneously avoiding discussion about the externalities like nuclear waste storage, nuclear proliferation, even the inherent security issues around large centralized power generation or what will happen after wars or other emergencies force workers to abandon nuclear facilities. So I don't trust them, and that's why I don't consider nuclear to be a viable alternative, and I have an unlimited list of evidence against it so I don't bother debating it anymore. Which leaves us with what I feel is the actual solution. Yet again, as in most things, we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. I think that we'll solve it through cultural evolution. Each of us has to get to sustainability on an individual level, then lift at least one other person (preferably someone we don't know) out of dependence. Which is still a big problem, but it's smaller than paying off a mortgage. So everyone's gotta wake up, forget they got hoodwinked, stop listening to the wealthy and powerful people talking us out of this, and just start doing it. Be a real conservative, lead by example. Be a real liberal, pay it forward. Mourn the breakdown of our institutions that set this back 40 years. Then do something about it by evangelizing sustainability and stop voting for people who pass the buck. Help people who don't get it find their way out of cognitive dissonance. Solarpunk is a great place to start.
• Kosirich 4y ago
  My dad just installed 200kW on the roof of his factory. The biggest issue is getting the blip* contract with the grid so you could sell the electricity back, and I mean that at any rate. This is by far the biggest hurdle so having an alternative to store energy that makes economic sense will be the biggest wind in the back for a lot of people wanting to do the same.
• ku-man 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• osigurdson 4y ago
  >> but the energy demands are astronomical Maybe not the best idea then.
  • StevenWaterman 4y ago
    If energy production is increasing exponentially, an astronomical demand very quickly becomes manageable and then trivial The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi
• skybrian 4y ago
  This article seems rather hand-wavy. I would have liked to seen more about what the physical and economic limits might be. In particular, how the cost of the solar panels themselves compare with all the other costs needed to get a working plant. Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
  • philipkglass 4y ago
    See section 5.2 of this report: "U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmark: Q1 2020" https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01 per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters, electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system) accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11. The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the stacked bar chart, but below $0.02. Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are already companies working on automating additional elements of solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY AES claims that with this robot, a crew of only 3 people can install a megawatt of panels in a week: https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar You could install all the panels for a 100 megawatt solar farm like that analyzed above with 6 months and 12 people.
• holografix 4y ago
  Can someone point me to a “loss of performance” type formula for solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90° and “sunshine strength” as the sun rises and dips in the sky?
• tambourine_man 4y ago
  It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out. It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big barrier is political. There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership. And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
    • tppiotrowski 4y ago
      I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet. Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
      • epistasis 4y ago
        Make financial sense to whom? If solar is cheaper than natural gas, how does a utility profit from charging less? They are highly regulated, and are usually allowed to take a percentage as profit. So it's in their interest to take the more expensive option, depending on regulations Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past five years of cost data.
        • tppiotrowski 4y ago
          Natural gas runs on cloudy days and at night. Taking a bus is cheaper than flying, but if you want to get somewhere fast you need to fly. Price is just one metric.
• alsargent 4y ago
  To get a sense of how many solar panels and batteries we'll need, drive around Houston, Texas some time. You'll see mile after mile of chemical refineries. Granted, some of these are for plastics and not energy production. But a lot ARE for energy production -- and it's crazy to imagine how many square miles of solar and battery factories we'll need to provide an equivalent amount of energy production.
• woah 4y ago
  Is this better or worse than the one where they are cooking corn husks to make oil to squirt into the ground?
  • AdamTReineke 4y ago
    This is better. Terraform believes they can make methane from the air for cheaper than it can be extracted from the ground, leading to a preference for "carbon neutral" fuels. Part of their thesis though is the requirement for solar to keep getting cheaper and cheaper (as it has). Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.
    • changoplatanero 4y ago
      What's a more efficient way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen: using electricity from a solar panel or using photosynthesis in a plant?
      • outworlder 4y ago
        That is a good question. Do you have any uses for the plant, or does it create interesting byproducts for you? Photosynthesis is not very efficient, but it is great at making complex organic molecules like sugar or cellulose. But a plant needs more than power. It needs nutrients, usually in the form of fertilizer. They also don't generally make hydrogen, not directly at least.
      • jjk166 4y ago
        Electrolysis is orders of magnitude more efficient, but your equipment isn't self replicating.
      • manmal 4y ago
        Another thing to consider: plants currently require a lot of natural gas or other fossil fuels to grow. Droughts and heat waves can disrupt production.
        • 4y ago
• walrus01 4y ago
  We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics. I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power. The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it. https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-hvdc-link-between-the-uk-and-norway-is-completed/ https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
  • jonatron 4y ago
    https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ not Libya, but Morocco.
  • dangerlibrary 4y ago
    • walrus01 4y ago
      I read the article, I disagree with the concept of using PV to generate artificial hydrocarbon fuels in general, as not a great business plan. It's not the best use of the technology when we should be bypassing that entirely. Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir or something if you need energy storage, not drive a complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store in a tank and burn in an engine.
      • jjk166 4y ago
• fermentation 4y ago
  In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.
  • jeffbee 4y ago
    We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the phenomenon of “curtailment” where we can’t use solar power when and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production. Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production. In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses. Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should. I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
    • zbrozek 4y ago
      I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array, a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.
• sneedchucksneed 4y ago
• intrepidhero 4y ago
  I get sabatier and electrolysis but what is a CO2 concentrator? Or rather how does it work? I thought that was the expensive and relatively unknown part of the process. Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
  • AdamTReineke 4y ago
    Their white paper covers it, linked from their site. > CO2 concentration is performed using a closed lime/calcite calcination cycle, operating at ambient temperature and pressure. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-industries-whitepaper/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...
    • outworlder 4y ago
      Can I borrow one for my Sodastream? :)
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        You may not like the 850°C operational temperature at home. But the cold part of the cycle, that actually concentrates the CO2 is fun to do at lab-scale, you just have to buy the CaO (and prepare for it becoming very hot).
  • seltzered_ 4y ago
    Website seems like the opposite of one of their competitors, https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/
• rob_c 4y ago
  And a lot of so far non existent recycling technologies and resources...
  • seltzered_ 4y ago
    This is an important point. There was a recent article inquiring the issues in recycling solar panels installed 20-25 years ago: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california-rooftop-solar-pv-panels-recycling-danger https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california... .
    • jeffbee 4y ago
      That is pure fossil industry propaganda. There is no cadmium in ordinary terrestrial solar panels. The lead, if it’s there at all, is in the solder and easily recovered by a pass through a 300-degree intake process. All of the solar panels installed in California, ever, would easily fit in the parking lot of Dodgers stadium, stacked to a reasonable height. They are non-toxic, insoluble bulk crystalline materials.
      • seltzered_ 4y ago
        "This story has been edited to clarify that panels containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily used in utility-grade applications."
        • kragen 4y ago
          The more important point is that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily not used at all. The PVXchange pricing page stopped quoting prices for thin-film panels years ago because silicon panels are now totally dominant in the market.
        • jeffbee 4y ago
          That's slightly better but they should never have printed it. Imagine writing such a story about the tiny amount of lead in a million solar panels without mentioning that every car battery sold in California comes with more lead than 2000 solar panels combined. Edited to add: """…Current CdTe panels contain approximately 6 g/m2, resulting in cadmium emissions of 0.5g/GWh, equivalent to that of a coal fired power plant. The majority of these emissions (77%) result from mining and utilization of the modules, therefore a comprehensive collection and recycling program would not reduce the environmental impacts of these panels. """ -- Brookhaven National Lab So there you go. Even if you take all retired utility-grade thin-film PV panels, grind them to a fine powder, and scatter them in the biosphere, you still emit less Cd than a coal-fired power station.
• someweirdperson 4y ago
  > "Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas." That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.
• standardUser 4y ago
  Can anyone provide a summary of this blog post? I am finding it strangely tricky to follow.
  • jtolmar 4y ago
    Terraform Industries has a process for converting atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons (particularly "natural" gas), at the cost of a huge amount of electricity. Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper. The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power, which would be good for the planet and people in general (and unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).
    • standardUser 4y ago
      Thank you, that is what I gathered, give or take. I guess I was just taken aback by the idea that instead of displacing natural gas we would use more energy to make natural gas. Seems like the ultra-gargantuan investments needed for this kind of transition would be better spent transitioning to a mostly-electric energy economy.
      • jtolmar 4y ago
        If you're a central planning committee trying to solve for the best outcome under physical constraints, nothing beats nuclear power and railroads. If you're living in an economic system where investment is primarily determined by rate of profit, then you need to identify a solution where everyone involved is making more money than they would be without you. So it's very important they're competing with oil on economic terms while increasing demand for solar.
        • standardUser 4y ago
          Maybe if natural gas was in short supply I could understand their angle. But it isn't, so I don't. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. Meanwhile, global warming, the paramount problem, needs fast solutions, not elaborate stopgap workarounds.
• akira2501 4y ago
  A monoculture of generation and distribution technologies is not a desirable outcome from an engineering perspective. Your goal shouldn't be to put PV everywhere and then just "solve the distribution problem." You're almost certainly going to make things worse that way. Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function. It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.
  • gregschlom 4y ago
    It sounds like you didn't read the article. They aren't talking about putting solar panels everywhere, they're talking about using massive amounts of solar panel in a specific location and use the energy to convert the CO2 in the air into methane.
    • KennyBlanken 4y ago
      That and nobody has ever suggested that we rely solely on solar for energy needs. Wind, for example, is cheaper than solar (though solar is catching up.)
      • jshen 4y ago
        Wind and solar both need to be combined with something else because it’s not always sunny and windy.
        • whimsicalism 4y ago
          Energy storage
          • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
            Could you be more specific? Because battery energy storage barely works for houses and you can't build pump storage everywhere. Then there are few prototypes like Power-To-Gas which has promising prospect and rest is in level of sci-fi
• outworlder 4y ago
  If we forget about where the power is coming from for the moment, wasn't the US Navy experimenting with fuel synthesis? Did that go anywhere? A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer. Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers-could-soon-use-innovative-fuel-made-from-seawater-161519.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers... 300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible potential. Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the tech.
  • user-one1 4y ago
    You should check out Prometheus Fuels: https://prometheusfuels.com/ https://prometheusfuels.com/
  • martyvis 4y ago
    Porsche are on to it. https://newsroom.porsche.com/en_AU/2022/sustainability/porsche-invests-development-industrial-efuel-production-chile-usa-australia-27945.html https://newsroom.porsche.com/en_AU/2022/sustainability/porsc...
  • beambot 4y ago
    A project related to the Navy project was "Project Foghorn" at GoogleX: https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-aims-turn-solar-and-wind-power-gasoline https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...
• mgerdts 4y ago
  There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details. > Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas. Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water. Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
  • greenthrow 4y ago
    It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa. I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
    • goethes_kind 4y ago
      Why do you not believe in synthetic hydrocarbons? What else do you believe is a better alternative then?
      • greenthrow 4y ago
        Your questions are loaded. You're doing the religious person thing of "Well you don't believe in Jesus, so what do you believe in?" Just because I don't believe synthetic hydrocarbons are a good idea doesn't mean I have to have a replacement.
        • illiac786 4y ago
          The point is “if there is nothing better or less bad, then we have to go for it”. Shouldn’t stop us from looking for something better though.
• leobg 4y ago
  What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill my house’s tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that something that would be technically feasible today?
  • ttyyzz 4y ago
    Hydrogen. This is my neighbor: https://hoermannsolar.de/wohnen-im-wasserstoffhaus/ https://hoermannsolar.de/wohnen-im-wasserstoffhaus/
    • manmal 4y ago
      I keep reading that H2 storage is difficult, lossy, and dangerous. H2 gas stations have blown up every now and then. Has that changed?
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        Hydrogen can be stored underground (and is), just like natural gas. This is much cheaper per unit energy storage capacity than storing energy in batteries.
        • ttyyzz 4y ago
          there is a short term battery based storage but the long term storage for the winter months is the h2 storage. I think the system is very expensive but a cool prove of concept and for sure a step in the right direction.
          • leobg 4y ago
            Do you have an idea of how much that system costs? I mean if you could pay 100k once and be free of all energy bills for the lifetime of the house/the system it could be quite a value proposition. May Putin, OPEC and the government do what they want - you just do your own power and heat, with no more middlemen.
• elihu 4y ago
  Another use of natural gas is to make fertilizer. Maybe you'd use a different process though if your end goal is to make ammonia? (I'm not an expert, but it seems you'd use electrolyzed hydrogen either way, but Haber Bosch reacts with nitrogen instead of CO2.)
• shaburn 4y ago
• taf2 4y ago
  Why don’t we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point that we can store enough energy for everyone
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    Because they are too expensive and take too long to build. One gets much more CO2 reduction per $, and much more quickly, from spending on renewables.
    • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      Regulated one to be too expensive, subsidized the other to be cheap. The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of education, and three small scope issues that range from unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made nuclear too expensive to be viable.
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        The arguments against nuclear are based on long history of economic failure. The same tired excuses are always trotted out. It's all someone else's fault. Money talks, shit walks. The captains of industry and finance are treating nuclear like the failure it is. No money for this money pit.
• acyou 4y ago
  In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a closed system requires net energy input across the system boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy input than smaller increases of concentration. Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high. For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.
  • celtain 4y ago
    >Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture. Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably). At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.
  • kragen 4y ago
    It's curious that you didn't actually include the calculation of what the minimum energy requirement; instead, you just assert without evidence that it is "very, very, very high". In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environmental_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical. Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require? Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
• antishatter 4y ago
  Solar is a meme, nuclear is the only way we get the grid off carbon.
• acidburnNSA 4y ago
  You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.
  • kragen 4y ago
    Nuclear power plants cannot operate in the Sahara Desert; they need access to cooling water.
    • acidburnNSA 4y ago
      They'd have to use dry cooling in that environment. A bit more cost but fully doable. You can reject 375 degreeC core heat even in the Sahara
      • kragen 4y ago
        True! And you might not even have to redesign most of the power plant, just the final stages of cooling. You could even avoid suffering lower Carnot efficiency during the day by using a daily thermal store. Other problem, even without redesigning significant parts of atomic power plants, they're economically uncompetitive with PV.
        • acidburnNSA 4y ago
          The worst builds ever are worse than PV (this is how lazard computes it) but Hualong 1 and APR1400 designs are cheaper when you consider full systems costs. We'll build those.
          • kragen 4y ago
            Maybe, we'll see. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't seem to agree with you, even though the capacity factor of PV in the PRC is absolutely abysmal. The figures I've seen suggest that the capex cost of a coal power plant — which is basically a nuclear power plant without the nuclear reactor — is high enough to be uncompetitive with PV in most of the world now, even if the coal were free. So I'm skeptical that GE or CGN has found a way to make their nuclear power plants as cheap as PV, except in, like, Manchuria or Svalbard or something.
• mmaunder 4y ago
  The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure. We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year. Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable. Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    You have it backwards. Solar panels are a fungible commodity good with no differentiation besides quality and cost. The financial incentive points strongly in the direction of longevity.
  • windows2020 4y ago
    > Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria? I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.
    • jakear 4y ago
      > Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria? Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.
      • kfarr 4y ago
        Yeah but would you tell a living plant that to their face? Those poor ivy, kudzu, algae, and dandelion weeds! /s
• shanghaikid 4y ago
  China dominates industry.
• maerF0x0 4y ago
  The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically. Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis. Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines. Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy. But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios... Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject. [1]: Chapter on solar: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Without Hot Air and this blog are polar opposites. Without Hot Air uses costs from 2008 and assumes that they won't improve. The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong. OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.
    • maerF0x0 4y ago
      While the cost of the hardware has, many factors still apply such as efficiency and thusly the total area of solar required. You're right though that the book is not up to date, and getting long in the tooth in some aspects.
      • 4y ago
• Willish42 4y ago
  Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever? Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane. Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN
  • blurker 4y ago
    I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless. Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.
• ianai 4y ago
  “Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas” Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural gas underground in the same areas we’ve been taking it out? Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little carbon sequestration. (Can’t be sure with myself whether I’m serious or sarcastic in this one. But I definitely want carbon out of the air…)
  • sbierwagen 4y ago
    If you're doing carbon sequestration you skip the part where you convert it to methane and just sequester the captured CO2. Given the scale of the problem, something like that will (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a political solution, eventually every current natural gas well will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were. However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture, barring nanotech magic, will be done via enhanced weathering or tree burial.
    • xbmcuser 4y ago
      If they make it profitable to get carbon out of the air which this suggests it will get a lot of private investments. This will also make carbon worth something so instead of letting it out in the atmosphere there will be effort to capture and sell it to the solar methane generators.
      • sbierwagen 4y ago
        GP asked about sequestration. Most of the productive economic uses for CH4 require burning it. Liquid synfuels are great and wonderful but they are carbon neutral! You can use atmospheric CO2 as feedstock for plastic production, but world plastic production is only 380 million tonnes a year, while there's more than 1 trillion tonnes of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take two and a half millennia to convert that to plastic.
• danschumann 4y ago
  I mean if we suck it out of the air and put it back in cars, then we close the loop, right? No more externalities?
• azinman2 4y ago
  Given all of the factors involved to manufacture the capacity the author is talking about (we'll ignore labor & land costs to install), wouldn't it be better to put that into cheaper/safer/smaller nuclear power? It already runs 24/7 with no CO2.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    Run the numbers, I don't think there's any chance of nuclear providing any sort of economic competition. Even at hopelessly optimistic prices like $7k/kW overnight cost, nuclear is at a huge disadvantage to current solar pricing. Much less the pricing for solar at halfway through the nuclear reactor's life, 20-30 years from now. Additionally, we have little hope of scaling nuclear construction capacity to meet the necessary demand. Whereas solar/wind/storage is way ahead and scaling at ridiculously high rates. Spend 5 years building a reactor, and you get a some number of GW. Spend that same construction capacity building mines and factories, and you get some GW/year additional production capacity. Construction capacity is fixed, really bad, and productivity has not increased in years. Applying that construction capacity to nuclear is a linear attack to energy production. Applying that construction capacity to solar/wind/storage is an exponential attack on energy production.
• zmix 4y ago
  Article has very good wording!
• scaramanga 4y ago
  As in many times more solar panels than can be constructed with all of the resources that can possibly ever be extracted from the earth? I suppose that is true, and an be verified with some pretty simple back of the envelope calculations. I must admit, I only skimmed through the apparently meaningless technobabble, but if someone could let me know succinctly, we still don't have anything more effective at carbon sequestration that trees, right? And how well are trees doing?
  • hedora 4y ago
    Capturing a gallon of gasoline CO2 emissions from the atmosphere would cost about a dollar at scale. (1 gallon -> 20lbs CO2. Technologies advertising $100/ton of CO2 are somewhat common these days. A ton is 2000lbs, so $100 / ton CO2 implies $1 per gallon of gasoline). There are many technologies that could achieve this, but I don’t think this article is describing one of them. They want to convert CO2 and water to natural gas and have roughly 30% energy efficiency. A gallon of gas contains 33kWh, so (handwave gasoline == natural gas), it costs 100kWh per gallon equivalent. A kilowatt hour is at least $0.10, so > $10 per gallon-captured-ish. If the carbon intensity of natural gas is similar to gasoline, so the computation is close enough and the technology in the article is about 10x off state of the art. On the bright side, the article’s technology would “only” require 5% of the earth’s surface be covered in solar panels, so state of the art would need 0.5%, which is feasible, in terms of land use, at least. Carbon intensity table: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/biomass-energy-resources/reference-biomass/facts-figures/carbon-emissions-of-different-fuels/ https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/b...
• InDemoVeritas 4y ago
  Is there enough silver to make 300 TW capacity of solar panels?
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    Silver is not absolutely needed. Copper can be used for front contacts, but it has to be separated from the silicon by a thin layer of nickel or molybdenum to prevent reaction of the copper with the silicon.
• bratwurst3000 4y ago
  I once estimated that it need the surface area of spain to power all of the world. Asuming all energy is electricity at that point. And I only took bad numbers like 100w sqm for 2-3 h a day. So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.
• hedora 4y ago
  I really want carbon capture to work, but arguing from first principles, I think the approach in the paper will be a niche product, and is probably a decade too early. (I honestly do wish them well.) Feel free to poke holes in my math: From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by three below. They propose using this for natural gas production for home heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have coefficients of power above four, in practice. So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient; they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it. Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly. With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand! Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the weekend.) On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications: There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just" break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's much better than net zero. As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have already ramped carbon capture!
• briantakita 4y ago
  Abiotic genesis of petroleum https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2008RG000270 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... Observed abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20060926_CHARM_Waite.pdf https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20...
• alex_young 4y ago
  Are synthetic hydrocarbons more efficient energy storage than li batteries? Seems unlikely.
  • alvah 4y ago
    Efficiency isn't the goal here. Energy density & re-using existing infrastructure are the points.
• jtdev 4y ago
• caseyf7 4y ago
  Why is China’s photovoltaic potential so low?
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    Cloudiness in the populated eastern/southeastern part of the country. Tibet's insolation is really good, though.
• oxff 4y ago
  Just use nuclear power.
• Helmut10001 4y ago
  People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert. I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter). Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level. So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide). .. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2]. [1]: https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX [2]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/ https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/
  • stolsvik 4y ago
    Wasn't the article exactly about this need for a massive over capacity of installed PV, and that it still is possible to do?
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter). Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass. Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules. Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  My Casio watch is solar powered and the "panel" can't be seen becaue it's too small and incorporated in the design (btw. best watch ever, <$100, solar, radio, Gshock). We will film print "panels" everywhere, all office buildings, all cars. If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.
• ngcc_hk 4y ago
  3 important take 1. Is Solar economic viable? Not sure “ Crude oil prices are between $60 and $100/barrel, indicating cost parity at between $10 and $17/MWh. There are already solar farms installed in some places that sell power at these prices, and between now and 2030 solar costs should come down at least another 60%.”. But $60 is high. Obviously not now but just months ago we talked about selling oil for loss. Freaking is $40 somewhat I remember 2. The artificial Russian invasion of Ukraine The tyranny of Russia need 10 years to resolve. And solar might work in this decade abd hope his learning curve continue. 3. Local game to play like river The play like conversion of solar back to ch4 (methane) or sea to river etc only make sense in a few place. It is local. In fact one wonder why Australia and Sahara desert is not more solar. 4. Transportation might be hard 1/3 lost to cable. Still as a guy demo you need a hugh solar plant farm to do one house. Still need solar farm and storage via many means.
• pixiemaster 4y ago
  in WW2, we moved to war economy to build multiple planes per hour, multiple landing ships per day etc, all while rubber, steel, oil, where in short supply. we should do this again with solar panels. a vast overproduction of solar energy would even allow for less distribution need, doing away with wasting time&energy on hydrogen and batteries.
• betwixthewires 4y ago
  All that gas and oil was once a massive biological solar panel, covering much of the ocean, absorbing sunlight, storing it, reproducing, growing only to get subducted and stored for us, like a battery. For a billion years. When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world, razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that without doing more environmental damage than our current state of affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it. If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three quarters of the world's human population, along with the livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed that was made from oil. It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think we should do it?
  • tppiotrowski 4y ago
    I think solar panels are a bit more efficient at converting sunlight > electricity than the chemical process of sunlight > photosynthesis > decomposition > burning fossil fuel. Take the ICE that only coverts something like 20% of fuel into motion, the rest is lost to heat. The electric motor is far more efficient. You'd need to update your reasoning to take into account all the efficiencies lost in the fossil fuel creation and consumption in order to generate electricity.
    • betwixthewires 4y ago
      No I don't, and I'll tell you why. The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what, tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that of the oceans? Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years, but let's ignore that too. Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200 years. I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly how much environmental damage do you think such a project would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more or less destructive than current climate change projections? It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward: get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy that is not required by life on earth, out of material not currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking with wood and cowdung again. Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.
• stewbrew 4y ago
  BTW the author is the founder of a company called Terraform Industries. (Their for a commercial business strangely looking homepage: https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/.) This is funny because there is also a company called Terraform Power in the renewable business. The names of these two companies seem surprisingly close to me. Are these two somehow connected? Is this just ignorance on part of the author? On their Twitter profile they talk about "Gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis". Which is an interesting wording for a company that doesn't even have a proper homepage.
• neonsunset 4y ago
  Or just a few nuclear power plants…
• mikewarot 4y ago
  It seems to me we need a lot of nuclear power. In the US, we need to close the fuel cycle, reprocessing all the existing spent fuel, and building a new class of reactors that can handle the resulting fuel mix. With this base energy supply in hand, our options are far more flexible for extracting carbon from the air, and either making fuels, or petrochemical feed stock from it.
  • Kon5ole 4y ago
    I think new nuclear is a distraction from the best solution. Closing the fuel cycle is a good idea of course but we don't know how to do that yet. Current reprocessing doesn't remove the waste it just reduces it. Reprocessing that can entirely get rid of the waste needs a scientific breakthrough that certainly might happen, but trying to make it happen will require research centers with highly qualified staff, very expensive machinery and will take a long time to set up. Meanwhile just about anyone can put solar panels on their roof making it possible for the state to save fuels in central power plants for use during the night. This benefit is immediate, and because anyone can do it it's currently being deployed faster than even non-reprocessing nuclear power plants can be built. So instead of aiming for new classes of reactors I think we should build already known classes of solar panel factories and hydrogen electrolysers. Hydrogen electrolysers are insanely simple, you can build one using stuff you are likely to have in your home already. The main argument against it at grid-scale is the efficiency, but with enough solar panels efficiency becomes basically meaningless. When you are filling your "water bottle" from the Niagara you can spill a lot and it won't matter.
    • mikewarot 4y ago
      Many of the issues you site about nuclear power have been solved. Here's a quote from an answer by acidburnNSA [1] who works in the industry, to a different story here on HN. "Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32208505
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  <whisper>we're gonna need nuclear no matter what the "green" power people say</whisper>
  • brazzy 4y ago
• wheelerof4te 4y ago
  What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power. To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is. Large wind turbines also need a lot of space to be efficient. And you can't just place those anywhere, either. Wind turbines need strong wind to work. Hydro power plants need water flow to generate energy. So you can't have those anywhere, of course. The only reliable and eco-firendly way to generate power are nuclear power plants. You can build them anywhere, they produce small waste per output and they require about the same space as any coal-based plant. Sadly, you need good experts and no bad luck to operate them safely. Otherwise, we saw what happens.
  • iso1631 4y ago
    Crops under solar panels: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=planting+under+solar+panel&atb=v329-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=planting+under+solar+panel&... "researchers are showing how panels can increase yields and reduce water use on a warming planet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power "As of 2020, the total worldwide offshore wind power nameplate capacity was 35.3 gigawatt" Many areas need large amounts of cheap clean electric, but don't need them 24/7. If your CO2 sequestran or hydrogen generator or desalination only runs during the day, or when the wind is blowing, meh.
  • pawsforthought 4y ago
    Agrivoltaics [1] has enormous potential. [1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/publications/studies/APV-Guideline.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
  • Kon5ole 4y ago
    >What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power. You need energy storage as well, people have realized this and it's being built in most countries. Hydro however is enough on it's own, and is in fact also one of the best forms of energy storage. If you have enough hydro to cover half your needs, adding "half your needs" from wind and solar lets you save hydro for the other half (This is a huge simplification but essentially true) >Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is. I don't see where the problem is. You seem to postulate that a solar power plant needs to be built like a nuclear power plant and take up a huge area of new land. It doesn't. You can put solar where you are already doing other things. In fact, we could just build solar roofs on existing parking lots! Shade is very nice for parked cars and the area currently used by parking lots is enough in most countries. Also, parking lots are not used for agriculture. I think the real thing people don't realize is just how great a solution solar power really is, because it's new and has enormous implications. So far most of the development has been done on a basically amateur level. Distributed energy generation and decimated price of electricity will disrupt a lot of powerful incumbents, so there's bound to be some propaganda against it from many sources. If the claims in the story are true, anyone using IEA as a source would be lead to believe that solar has no future, for example. But the actual solar developments have surpassed IEAs 20-year estimates within 1 year, 13 years in a row.
• scotty79 4y ago
  This is fascinating technology for turning CO2 into C https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-metal-a-key-to-carbon-capture-/2-1-1217775 https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...
• guerby 4y ago
  Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around 400 EUR/kWh for 6000 cycles at 80% degrations, that's 0.074 EUR per kWh out the the battery. 5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh. PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year life. All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or two electric vehicule charging at home. As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar production is way lower than the rest of the year. An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it, if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar + heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity with home sized equipment (yet).
• 35mm 4y ago
  I think electrolysing water into hydrogen using excess solar in the winter, then using that directly for heating in the winter would make a lot of sense.
  • anotherhue 4y ago
    Hydrogen is quite difficult to store, so one would have to factor those costs in the before deciding.
    • affgrff2 4y ago
      And not having to store it locally but pumping it in form of methane into the existing net could further reduce costs.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Nice article, but one sentence annoyed me: > At current rates of production growth, the supply/demand mismatch will see a 10 year backlog between the time when local solar powered synthetic fuel production reaches cost parity with fossil sources, and when solar supply will be available to meet that demand. I hate this use of "at current rates", it's basically a lie if you don't follow up with some kind of lower bound to go with that upper bound and people believing this is not possible, or too costly, or too late is one of the main problems. He called out the hairy back prediction graph further up and then did basically the same thing with words. But overall a good summary.
• Symmetry 4y ago
  In the US at least I think it would be better to describe the rate at which we add solar to the grid as limited by regulatory and grid management issues. The backlog of projects waiting to be approved, in terms of capacity, is about as large as the currently installed solar capacity. One problem here is figuring out the transmission issues related to adding new capacity, so it's not just a purely regulatory issue, but the way in which grid capacity is added assumed new plants would look more like coal plants so there are regulatory aspects to it. But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about any of that.
• pbourke 4y ago
  I was confused about something in this article. After the natural gas is synthesized, it’s pumped into the existing NG infrastructure for heating and electricity generation? Doesn’t that emit CO2 into the atmosphere once again? Or is it such that CO2 removed >> CO2 added?
  • BatFastard 4y ago
    Indeed that NG that is burned adds to CO2, but its considered neutral since it was derived from atmospheric CO2. We still need sinks for CO2 that will be removed to atmosphere. But at least we can do it cost efficiently.
• djenendik 4y ago
  As others have pointed going carbon neutral is a good step, but should we should keep in mind the CO2 ppm that will be reached at the neutrality point. Is this something that we can live with?
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  What about the toxic waste from expended panels? Since you’re going to be using “a lot of” them.
• ChuckMcM 4y ago
  As I pointed out to Casey on Twitter as well, this strategy works really well with Nuclear as well. Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation. My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there was any leakage of radioactive material in the even more rare event of an accident) And have that plant produce methane 24/7. It can ship the methane by pipeline to anywhere and provide heating or electricity using existing gas infrastructure. If you made it a more complex breeder reactor (or had a breeder reactor on site and a fuel reclamation facility) it could do that essentially forever. (caveat lifetime of materials and maintenance etc). Solar works for this too, but you have to build a lot of panels (this is the article lede of course). This is also how fusion would change everything as well, with excess power you could spend it on making carbon neutral burnable fuels and desalinating water for mitigating droughts.
  • ajuc 4y ago
    > Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation. I very much doubt you can get higher efficiency by going electricity -> fuel -> pipeline -> generator than by going electricity -> wires -> And even if you just use it for heating (so you skip the last part) - it wouldn't be worth it. In particular big turbines are about 60% efficient, ICEs are about 30% efficient and electricity -> fuel conversion is even worse.
    • ChuckMcM 4y ago
      Back when I had a class in power engineering as part of my EE program there was about a week discussing transmission line loss. The example we worked on was Hoover Dam which sends its electricity 266 miles over transmission lines to LA where the University was. It was remarkable how much energy was lost both in what are called "i2r" (I squared R) losses (that is just the transmission wires losing energy as heat) and radiation losses where the power lines are essentially very long antennas. There are lots of strategies that are employed to mitigate both kinds of losses, those strategies have their own limits as well. It is all rather more complex than just hooking a wire from point A to point B, as such things are. The other advantage that Casey's scheme has is power generated during the day doesn't need to be consumed right away if it is stored in Methane. This is true of Nuclear power as well. The efficiency argument weakened still further if you compare the full cost of drilling, extracting, transporting, and then burning existing "fossil fuel" sources of methane because that not only damages the environment with the contaminated ground water from fracking or other extraction methods, but adds to greenhouse gasses in the the air. The efficiency here is that your take zero (or nearly so) carbon foot print energy generation to create fuel that has net 0 impact on warming gases in the atmosphere (it takes the CO2 out of the air which is then re-released back into the air when it is burned). For things that can't be electrified, or are better served by heat combustion. Those things are, jet fuel, heating homes, baking, etc. The other advantage is it re-uses existing infrastructure. So on a dollars per ton reduction of CO2 it is much more efficient than existing solutions, whether you use solar or nuclear. Like most things, efficiency is a measure of some metric with respect to two choices to achieve the same result. The choice presented by Casey is "How do you get methane for things that use it?" If your metric is greenhouse gas emissions you get more gas with has a much lower greenhouse gas impact. On that basis it is much more efficient whether you use Nuclear or Solar as your energy input.
• rahimiali 4y ago
  could someone explain the benefit of storing energy as natural gas? once you burn it, doesn't it result in co2? doesn't that defeat the effort? also is natural gas really easier to pipe around than electricity? I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for helpful guidance.
  • stocknoob 4y ago
    Do you want to burn new carbon that’s in the ground, or recycle what’s already in the air? We have tremendous infrastructure already dedicated to using natural gas (cooking, heating, transport, industrial equipment) and it won’t be electrified overnight. First get to carbon neutral, then worry about carbon negative.
    • rahimiali 4y ago
      Thanks for making it crisp. This argument was in the article, but somehow it wasn't popping at me.
• kesor 4y ago
  Isn't this what trees do already? And if trees don't do it "good enough", should we really replace the trees with technological mini-chemical-plants that will starve all of the CO2? I don't get it. Why do humans think their crazy ideas are better for nature, while at the same time it is obvious they are going to exterminate whole species when implemented.
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    Trees don’t like it when you try to use up their stored energy and go and die on you.
  • nanomonkey 4y ago
    Not to mention that we've already made great headway into transforming plants and trees into a variety of stable fuel sources that can be used to heat and power our lives during the time periods where solar panels don't generate enough electricity. Our time would be better spent investing in making these conversion processes more reliable and efficient. Alcohol from fermentation of sugars, methane from anaerobic digestion, syngas/biogas/woodgas from gasification of woody biomass, and charcoal from the remaining carbon. All of these are fuel sources available from plants that pull in CO2 naturally from the environment, completing a cycle of energy production that doesn't alter our current CO2 levels upwards. They can be done on waste biomass left over from current agricultural processes or plants used for landscaping needs (hedges, shade trees, etc.). In fact, if you store away the carbon left over after gasification as biochar you can lower CO2 levels over time.
  • sn9 4y ago
    He addresses this in the whitepaper. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-industries-whitepaper/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu... Ctrl-f "Tree" to find the FAQ.