Thread: Solar Power and Its Deployment

Originally Posted by Hoplite

Some interesting calculations I did the other night.

The US consumes roughly 30 petawatts, or 18,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every year.

The Nellis Solar Power Plant in Nevada is 140 acres of land and can put out 18,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually at a cost of ~$100 million.

So if we assume that 1 acre can produce ~128 kwh of electricity if it has solar panels located on it, we can then calculate an area needed to provide power for the entire US.

Assuming the 1 acre of land can produce 128 kwh, we would need 140,625,000,000 acres to produce our entire power grid needs for one year. That's about 220,000,000 square miles....the US itself is 3,794,101 square miles.

Hrm. We're going to need MUCH more efficient solar cell. Does anyone have information on the average output of a solar cell? There isnt any real information on it, probably because it varies by design and generation.

Hasn't this been the complaint about solar power all along. It might be a workable idea on a house-by-house basis (I don't know: Haven't looked into it), but both Wind power generation and solar power have to come a long way before we can depend on them to start diminishing our dependence on fossil fuels.

Originally Posted by Hoplite

Hrm. We're going to need MUCH more efficient solar cell.

Thank you Captain Obvious.

While the exercise might be helpful... especially the next time someone insists that we need to move to solar power RIGHT NOW, I think the scale of the issue has been evident for a while.

That said, I see no real reason why both solar and wind could not be deployed on the land that surrounds most power stations, to provide power as conditions allow. That deployment also eliminates the need for grid expansion. I have also advocated the deployment of wind turbines along existing interstate highway R.O.W. Right down the center... no noise issues no senery to block, no clearance issues.

Your post brought to mind a conversation I had with my son after he spent nearly a weeks worth of summer job pay on one night out with a young lady. He said: 'Dad, girls aren't cheap... I'm going to need to make way more money.'

I hurt myself laughing...

Originally Posted by tsquare

Thank you Captain Obvious.

Do you get some kind of sexual gratification out of acting like a jerk?

While the exercise might be helpful... especially the next time someone insists that we need to move to solar power RIGHT NOW, I think the scale of the issue has been evident for a while.

Large solar farms can still provide LOTS of power and for a fraction of the cost of fossil and nuclear. If you have an entire grid of buildings that draw most or all of their power from roof-mounted solar panels, you can effectively take most of a city off the grid.

Simply because solar wont solve all our problems is no reason to balk at it.

I have also advocated the deployment of wind turbines along existing interstate highway R.O.W. Right down the center... no noise issues no senery to block, no clearance issues.

That's actually an interesting concept, I'd want to see information about wind speed in the areas proposed for this, but its none the less interesting.

Photovoltaics may have hit a dead end, but solar thermal shows a lot of promise.

Just for the sake of the argument, why just 18.000 kWh were is that number coming from?
I did a quick check and the Nellis Solar Power Plant has a capacity of 14 MW and a anual porduction of 30.000.000 kWh anually.

Photovoltaics didn't hit the end of anything yet.
It's a great technology because it has wonderful scalability and can be applied in very different ways. It can be incorperated in architecture and utilize the massive acres of roof tops we have.

The technology is also advancing into various ways.
Solar energy transformation rate is at 41% now. Not long ago people said more than 14% or more than 20% is theoretically impossible.

Something new is also CPV - Concentrated Photovoltaics.
It's aproaching Grid parity in the coming years.

Originally Posted by El_Zoido

Just for the sake of the argument, why just 18.000 kWh were is that number coming from?
I did a quick check and the Nellis Solar Power Plant has a capacity of 14 MW and a anual porduction of 30.000.000 kWh anually.

Photovoltaics didn't hit the end of anything yet.
It's a great technology because it has wonderful scalability and can be applied in very different ways. It can be incorperated in architecture and utilize the massive acres of roof tops we have.

The technology is also advancing into various ways.
Solar energy transformation rate is at 41% now. Not long ago people said more than 14% or more than 20% is theoretically impossible.

Something new is also CPV - Concentrated Photovoltaics.
It's aproaching Grid parity in the coming years.

Peak capacity and actual production can vary a fair amount. How much energy is Nellis actually producing and how much does it cost to maintain?

According to the claimed production capabilities we'd only need 5500 square miles of Nellis-like facilities to meet the civilllian energy demand of the nation.

Originally Posted by JDJarvis

Peak capacity and actual production can vary a fair amount. How much energy is Nellis actually producing and how much does it cost to maintain?

According to the claimed production capabilities we'd only need 5500 square miles of Nellis-like facilities to meet the civilllian energy demand of the nation.

In my opinion photovoltaics is best suited for small & medium size decentralized power production.
When used on your roof or near your town as a local project, it doesn't cost so much to maintain the power grid etc.

The solar power project in question was build to supply the military base next to it right?
Huge projects like that are important to bring the cost down and to showcase/test certain R&D advances. For centralized power production solar thermal power is far more apropriate right now, but in the future PV could become the cheaper and better solution.

Since Germany is kind of the Solar Eldorado due to indirect subsidies, I am perhaps more exposed to the current developements.
One of those rather new technologies is PV power production using organic materials. It allows to "print solar cells" on fabric. It's new & needs more R&D, but the potential for applications & cost reduction are massiv. Currently it only reaches 1-2% efficency.

The concentrated solar cells I mentioned are another example of how applied science & enginiering can push cost down.
It basicly combines cheap lenses that focus the light on a small spots, where a small highly efficiant PV solar cell converts the concentrated light into electricity. Solar cells are made out of artifically "grown" cristal materials. The cost of producing cells grows exponentially with the size of the cell. Huge cells of low quality materials are "cheap" anyways because they require less other materials (power grabbers, contacts,...) The CPV I mentioned was Invented/developed 2 years ago... currently being field tested in a pilot project in Spain.

The biggest advantage of PV and why I believe that pushing it is worth it, is the fact that everyone can put one on his roof or somewhere in his land. Add a battery and you are independent.
Except for places without sunlight for half a year, it is only a question of how many solar cells / battery capacity => production & installation cost.

The beauty of this is:
The cost of production maily depends on technological, enginiering & scale of production issues. Those issues are usually improved and lead to massive cost reductions.
Computers (also a semi conducter technology) witnessed incredible advances in it's 50 years of application. Today I can build a 1,5 Terraflop supercomputer for 2000€ that uses only 1200 Watt at home.... something that required millions and tens of thousands of Watts only a decade ago. Of course there was always massive demand for Computers. That's why we had massive private R&D during the last 3-4 decades. But in the early ages of the IT-Technology, the stuff was so new and the cost of getting into it so high, that it was just due to Government demand (Military, ...) that there was any R&D put into it. Next we got huge corperations investing into Computers. Their predictions were that there will never be home or public demand. Then there was massive public demand that outpreformed government & corperate demand and lead to the massive R&D spending and the subsequent reduction in cost we witness today.

The same as in the last stage of the computer/IT history can and is currently happening with renewable energy production.
The problem is, that this market didn't start with massiv demand. We had government sponsored R&D leading to government sponsored centralized energy production by corperations. Now the same cost-reduction is possible but the market is missing in most countries. Because when there is enough electricity, you don't NEED to install more. At the same time the Corperations use their influence & money to keep their monopoly on energy production. They are not interessted in seeing this Computer like price reduction in energy cost.
Why not? Because it will definatly indanger their market share. Energy Corperations who make their money from selling electricity that was produced in a centralized power plant, that requires some sort of fuel, and a massive power grid to transport it to you, are totally unneccessary if everyone can make their own electricity at home.

Second "beauty" of decentralized power production:
No or at least less grid costs / losses. Those make up a huge part of the electricity price. I think they are even equivalent to fuel costs in coal power plants.

Originally Posted by Hoplite

Some interesting calculations I did the other night.

The US consumes roughly 30 petawatts, or 18,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every year.

The Nellis Solar Power Plant in Nevada is 140 acres of land and can put out 18,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually at a cost of ~$100 million.

So if we assume that 1 acre can produce ~128 kwh of electricity if it has solar panels located on it, we can then calculate an area needed to provide power for the entire US.

Assuming the 1 acre of land can produce 128 kwh, we would need 140,625,000,000 acres to produce our entire power grid needs for one year. That's about 220,000,000 square miles....the US itself is 3,794,101 square miles.

Hrm. We're going to need MUCH more efficient solar cell. Does anyone have information on the average output of a solar cell? There isnt any real information on it, probably because it varies by design and generation.

Education time:

1. Solar technology has many different forms

• Biomass - using algae and photosynthesis to generate electricity
• Solar panels - Most commonly known - solar energy collection
• Solar-Thermal - Uses the heat from the sun generate electricity
• Solar sheeting - Invented in Iceland. These are like roofing shingles but collect even at night. Not as efficient as panels during the day but over a 24 hour period are far more efficient
• There is also other tech in the works that involves using a satellite to collect solar energy in space and either beam it to earth via high power laser or through a space elevator link. Ways to go on that though.

2. Apparently, Americans cannot conceive of something that is not centralized and controlled by a singular entity. Try to get solar energy to work only through hubs is short sighted. Putting panels/sheet/biomass on EVERY energy using structure PLUS solar hubs is the way to maximize the use of solar energy. It also makes blackouts a thing of the past because the grid produces it's own energy. This is where our government should be spending money, the energy savings alone would make it worth the investment.

3. Right now, solar power is being used a from-sun-to-toaster set up. Funny when you consider that battery technology is progressing by leaps and bounds. It's not a stretch to assume that it would not be so expensive to turn a wall in a basement into a wall of batteries that can store a month's worth of power. The tech is their. Quite mature actually. No one wants to talk about it though. Oil companies do not like batteries. It's why they killed the electric car back in the early '90s.

We had the time and money to implement solar tech in the 70s but big oil, auto manufacturers and coal companies lobbied it out of existence. If we stayed on Cartrs energy plan (he wanted to put solar panels everywhere) we would have been at the vey pinnacle of solar tech today.

This technology's only obstacle has been suppression coming from big business.