Will solar energy ever be not shit?
Yeah
Probably.
>>7667471
Depending on what you're trying to do, it's pretty non-shit now.
>>7667547
Home use.
>>7667565
But solar farms are better anon
You're implying that solar energy was shit in the first place.
>>7667587
>20% efficiency on solar panels
>not using god tier hydrogen
kek.
>>7667649
20% efficiency with an energy source you don't even need to pay for is pretty god damn good.
Not saying solar doesn't have its own problems, but still that's pretty good.
>>7667649
Hydrogen isn't a power source; it's a way of storing power. You don't know shit.
>>7667565
Do you have home use for natural gas and coal?
Solar farms are more efficient for mass energy use.
>>7667705
energy is an area where our reach has exceeded our grasp.
we have the ability to generate massive amounts of the stuff with a central solar farm, but unfortunately our distribution is absolute garbo. the losses are too great.
>>7667714
Agreed that transmission is still the problem, but efforts are being made with ultra high voltage transmission lines.
Upgrading the grid is messy stuff that is a lot of pricey investment for effectively just changing the source of your power from coal to solar/wind. But in the long run having such vision will pay itself off in orders of magnitude.
>>7667714
Just means we need slots of smaller farms.
Just stick the things on top of parking structures and shit. At my local VA hospital they put them over the parking lot, serve double duty of making energy and making shade.
>>7667705
The problem this image always ignores is you'd have to build a transmission line from Las Vegas to NYC, which is a fucking joke.
I know it says you should localize the sources more than is shown, but you don't get 330+ sunny days/year anywhere near NYC. Unless some extremely safe and cheap way of storing huge amounts electricity is discovered a pure solar/wind energy system will never happen. At that point you'd be better off putting the panels in space and beaming the power down to receiving stations via microwave. The sun shines constantly when you don't have a planet inbetween you and it, and you could relay the power wherever it was needed before beaming it down.
>>7667807
I can't either, but if you reread my post you'll see I presented it as another implausible scenario.
And the beam itself wouldn't be that concentrated, it would have to be fairly large so that the power/m^2 would be low enough not to fry birds, although it would be a no-fly zone I guess.
Either way centralizes power generation too much though, it would make the grid way too easy to attack.
>>7667791
They solved that problem some time ago. It is called high-voltage rails. Europe has been using it for quite some time now.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
>>7667471
Wind is the fastest growing renewable in America right now. Texas is already meeting 9% of all electrical energy needs from it.
DOE estimates 2030 will yield 20% of all American electricity being produced by wind power.
>http://energy.gov/eere/wind/20-wind-energy-2030-increasing-wind-energys-contribution-us-electricity-supply
Farmers are getting paid thousands of dollars a year to allow wind turbines on grazing land. It is too good to resist.
>>7667471
solar energy is shit and always will be.
dont let any faggot tell you different.
>>7667816
>HVDC
The longest one every built is still only about half the distance from LV to NYC. Maybe one that long could be built, but the potential for problems such as faults knocking out parts of the line are huge. Routine maintenance means taking parts of the line out of service, which on a system that big is a never ending process. You can obviously have multiple routes but that increases cost. I really can't pictures this happening like in that image at any point.
And once the government stops subsidizing wind it will have to stand on it's own the free market, which I don't think it would even come close to doing currently.
>>7667833
The idea has been around for a long time, there are just too many problems financially and security-wise for it to ever happen. Despite fusion perpetually being only 20 years away, I would bet you anything it becomes viable before space-based global solar power.
>>7667837
Why on earth would you need one that goes from LV to NYC?
You need one that goes from LV to the nearest solar and wind parks.
>>7667847
I'm talking about this image >>7667705. The nearest solar farm shown there to NYC is near Las Vegas, or maybe the one near Vancouver. If you want to power the world entirely on solar power using farms in those areas, you would need to connect them to everywhere else to distribute the power.
Like I said without some really efficient way to store the power generated by solar panels it is too dangerous to have someplace like NY run entirely on it. What if you get two weeks of shitty weather? How do you store enough power to run the entire Eastern seaboard for 2 weeks? If you want to say send power from where it's sunny, that could mean a 3000 mile long line. Putting solar panels in the Midwest is stupid, the ground is much more useful for growing crops. That image is a pipe dream. Coal is dying but natural gas is growing, the need for energy security is too great to trust it all to solar.
>>7667861
What! No, use your head.
That is just a representation of how much distributed land area you would need in total for complete solar. Nobody is advocating for a single mega solar park. Rather enough distributed networks all over the country would only need to add up to that single plot off land in land area.
>>7667705
Giant solar farms are a terrible idea - a single cloud will take out a sizable portion of your national energy production. Solar and Wind power are most useful when they're spread out to average out generation.
>>7667875
see
>>7667791
>I know it says you should localize the sources more than is shown, but you don't get 330+ sunny days/year anywhere near NYC. Unless some extremely safe and cheap way of storing huge amounts electricity is discovered a pure solar/wind energy system will never happen.
The only place in the US that gets that much sun is the Southwest because it's a desert. You can put panels in New England but they'll never be as efficient. It's not that it can't be done, it's just a waste of money and still less secure than natural gas.
>>7667882
Off-shore wind and nuclear power is going to be their solution. Mixed renewable were always going to be the future.
But if panel efficiency could go to 25-30, then even in the northeast it would be viable.
A guy from Exxon gave a lecture at my intro ChemE class and said fossil fuels will remain the dominant energy source in our lifetimes partly because none of the energy is lost in it's transportation through pipelines. He said long distance electricity loses energy through heat.
>>7667893
Thats a huge fallacy because you have to expend energy to mine the stuff and then transport it.
If not wind/solar, then nuclear will the dominant form of energy in our lifetime. Remember, China only has 35 years left of coal reserves in the country. If America doesn't do it, then China will.
>>7667893
>A guy from Exxon [] said fossil fuels will remain the dominant energy source in our lifetimes
I'm really surprised.
Anyway, that's bullshit. Fossil fuels are either a complete pain in the ass to handle, or require very lossy processes to turn into usable forms. For example, very little of the energy that comes out of an oil well actually ends up doing useful work. And I don't think we're about to start building cars that run on coal.
>>7667471
Most likely not we've hit a major wall in research and this wall unlike previous ones are due to a combination of the 2nd law of thermo dynamics, the amount of radiation emitted by the sun per square inch and the contraints of selecting chemical that has a very large band gap (this is not possible due to the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics).
There is no forseable breakthrough that will get us significantly further in terms of efficiency. Solar power is as good as dead for this century at least.
>>7667893
>believing anything Exxon says
>>7668015
>Solar power is as good as dead for this century at least.
No.
>>7667471
When we start mining asteroids to get tons of rare earth metals so we can make triple function panels cheaply.
>>7668140
What solar cells need rare earth elements? Also, asteroids do not have significant concentrations of REEs. The most costly part of current solar cells is processing the silicon.
Future solar cells may not need silicon. Polymer solar cells can be made of cheapo plastic. Nanoantenna solar cells could be made of regular stamped out metal.
No. It's complete shit compared to fusion.
As I understand the current situation
Solar panels are expensive to produce and have a limited lifespan.
At least here in NZ, the cost to fit your home out without government subsidies, barely begins to pay for itself before the panels need replacing
>>7668284
Economically they simply can't compete with alternatives without subsidies. But the fact that it even DOES pay for itself eventually demonstrates that it's not that far off.
But that's not so much saying "they're shit" as it is "they're shit compared to the alternatives." Compared to a few decades ago, Solar panels can produce a lot of energy. And, obviously, as other sources of energy get more expensive, solar becomes more economical.
>>7667893
HVDC -> 3,5% loss per 1000km
