Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
You couldn’t come up with a less efficient form of solar power if you tried. It’s there to subsidize US farmers.
brazil produces more biofuel iirc
That may be. But as a percentage of farm income, the prices that corn (and soybeans to an extent) demands is driven by biofuel mandates within the US. If the only market was food and export, those prices would be substantially lower.
meaning what
They’ve also cut down a lot of rain forests to do it.
no, the rainforests cut go majority to cattle ranching
Both statements can be true.
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
How about putting that farmland back to producing food, and covering all our rooftops and carparks with solar panels?
Its even more efficient. In Poland we have that project, where food is grown under solar panels - they harvest even more than before, because panels protect plants from too much sun.
I second this, if you design your solar panels well, not only do you get to outpu a lot of electricity, yiu actually increase your crop/cattle etc yield
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
And this whole thread ignores inclement weather. A few years ago Texas had 35MW of solar panels destroyed in minutes by hail. Hurricanes and tornadoes will do the same thing.
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
Fair point. It’s just the idea of using perfectly good farmland to fuel cars feels like a fucked up priority to me.
Hurricanes and Tornados can, and do, do the same to refineries too.
Please. I used to live in RI and driving through ri and ma you will regularly see ACRE upon ACRE of woodland mowed down, flattened, and thousanda of gaudy panels put up in what was once public lands and wooded areas. They do this right outside of the Worcester city limits like they don’t have acre upon ACRE of already developed paved over areas that could benefit from shade from solar panels(think car parks, strap mall and dept store building roofs, residential roofs etc). I’m all for solar but I hate when they destroy nature for no reason. I’m not stupid I know it’s easier to build them on a level earth than on rooftops but we only have so much land available as it is why not be more efficient with the land we have already used?
There is already an over production of food. We don’t need to grow more food.
I don’t know about that, but we certainly need to waste less food, and removing the profit motive from it’s production might help getting it to the people that need it but can’t get it. There are still people in the world starving needlessly.
We both grow more than we need, and throw more than we should away.
Some of that is a result of picky shoppers wanting unblemished produce. Some of that is a result of not having an
easyprofit motivated way of getting produce from where it’s grown to where it’s most desperately needed.We have tropical fruit available all year, but when impoverished peoples experience a crop failure, best we can do is send powdered milk.
Which incidentally may have cured them of lactose intolerance.
People are starving because capitalists would rather throw away perfectly good food and put bleach on it than give it to the starving to maximize their profits
That’s why I said removing the profit motive would be a good thing.
you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.
that and biofuels only land could produce the same as existing global electricity demand are bigger takeaways.
Article undersells the 7000twh of existing car+truck energy. With just 75% efficiency for solar panel to EV wheel, just 2366twh of solar would replace the ICE twh to wheel equivalent fuel consumption. So, the land conversion formula allows for 10x the number of cars and trucks. Even H2 electrolysis would permit 7x the number of cars and trucks (ensuring lighter trucks/cars as well) from biofuels land.
Saddly 75% is still a pipe dream, lucky to get 40% from panel to road. Not that biofuel is not one of if not the worst use of land mind you.
The DC-AC-DC conversion loop does cost 15% or so. LiFePo batteries (better than NMC) 10%, and motor 10-15%. AC grid transmission losses add more.
With home solar, DC charging (hopefully bidirectional), 75%-80% efficiency to the wheel. But sure, AC grid tied charging could drop it by 20%. Still better than 60% losses.
Comparing to ICE engines, its fair to exclude transmission losses (exists in both. about 5%), and there is regen available for EV, and it doesn’t idle. My original 75% claim may be too generous, but 3x efficiency of ICE is still fair.
Evs are 75% to 90% efficient from their battery, but the real issue is solar on the grid. Its way more then 20% loss from the grid, hell 40% loss in transmission is normal around here, and that’s just last run. The issue is that its loss on every step. I think local solar is the way to go for ev charging but this is clearly about mass deployment and that means the grid.
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
Oil refining uses an insane amount of energy.
An electric car could travel 60km (or more) on the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100km.
While that is technically true, that is not the best use for that land, nor is it a good way to setup solar.
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it’s paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there’s ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We’re going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there’d be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I’m sure there could be countries already doing it - I’m advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there’s crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I’ve contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I’m contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that’s just the one I’m using.
Legislation for solar roofs on car parks is a great start. It’s a win-win for space usage, just a more expensive installation. Korea just added some legislation
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie’s where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It’s a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
If you write movie’s, why don’t you also write author’s?
I’m on a phone (swipe autocomplete) and it was 4am when I couldn’t sleep (poor proofing)? You got upvote’s, impressive. <- Left another there for you
It’s been great traveling the world and seeing more and more solar installations. There is a long tail for things like aviation and plenty of chemistry but the world is changing. It would be nice if less governments were voted in that were anti the transition but progress is still being made
They’re right, in the sense of square acres.
Get ready for a rant.
Except it doesn’t work that way and it isn’t that simple, the article pokes a big hole in its own argument in the second sentence, the world, it’s spread out across the world. The crop land used for biofuel is hundreds or thousands of miles way from where the electricity would need to get to. The farmers would have nothing to farm and they would have to give up or lease their land to electric companies or the government. The entire infrastructure for utilities and farming would need to be torn down and rebuilt, it wouldn’t be practical for at least 2 generations once construction started, in that time we could be using a completely different form of fuel making solar obsolete.
The problem isn’t where to put panels but how to get electricity to the electric cars that are thousands of miles away from the farms and the farms are many miles from each other. Plus biofuels will never go away and we’ll need significant quantities for at least another hundred years.
Use old landfills or old quarries or building rooftops, they’re a lot closer to the cities. Why not use the windows of the buildings for
thermal energytransparent solar. Why not use the energy from our heating and cooling and plumbing systems to generate electricity. Plus we can do them all at the same time, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, put a windmill and solar panels and thermal on the same rooftop. Put steam turbines everywhere.Why? Because basic engineering will tell you that small areas of low quality waste heat isn’t something you turn into usable energy.
That’s the one sentence out of thay post I didn’t agree with a well.
Ok change it to transparent solar. I was half asleep
As another commentator points out, transportation of electricity and vehicles themselves are the major problems. Farmers that grow biofuels could conceivably shift to another crop, and many of the crops used for biofuels are routinely farmed for other uses (e.g., corn is animal feed and biofuel feed). In that regard, I disagree with the the argument that the entire infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.
the problem of getting electricity to cars is removed if we have better public transportation, though developing that infrastructure and reconfiguring the existing system (e.g., car-centric) is a much bigger problem. Regardless, you can still use solar for other uses (houses, industry) while you convert transportation slowly (and painfully, as we’ve really painted ourselves into a corner).
I do* like your take on alternate land uses for quarries (and mines! don’t forget those). Not all mines are close to cities, but some are. There’s a few really good example of mines installing solar panels on their reclaimed tailings storage facilities., or old mines being used for pumped hydro batteries.
The energy issue is multifaceted, and while it’s easy to say ‘just do nuclear’ ‘just do solar’ ‘just do hydro’, one size doesn’t fit all. However, the one thing that DOES fit, is how we have to start thinking about how to repurpose what we have already (e.g., windows as you point out) to suit our objectives of green energy.
I do agree, if we remove the problem then there’s no need for the solution. If we didn’t have to worry the sudden expansion of electric vehicles and large data centers. But would we not be exchanging one problem for another? A lot of cities were not built with future public transportation in mind so building railways and bus routes then changing how people travel might be just as hard as getting electricity from rural areas.
I also agree that the farmers would plant another crop. But covering the land with solar panels is just impractical. The reason these farms are located where they are is because turning it into biofuel crops is easy, inexpensive, and the land probably isn’t worth doing anything else with. Turning it into food crops would depend on climate and demand.
Either way, as a society, we have several immediate problems and you’re right there isn’t one way to solve them. I just felt that tiny patches of land spread out all over the world would generate enough power and get it to where it needs to be for everyone to have electric cars just seemed like a silly idea when there’s much simpler and faster ways to get power where it’s needed the most.
Especially since I’m an electrical engineer that works for a company that specializes in energy management, building controls, and engineering sustainablility into buildings. So I’m actively working on these things that are theory to most of the people here.
Any idea how much it would cost?
Big part of the cost could probably be planned over like 20 years too.
At least I’m the US, those crops are heavily subsidized so they could subsidize solar instead…
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Yes, we should continue to install solar, and the needed batteries or other storage methods. But, the future is fusion and geothermal. Geothermal development is making steady progress, in part by piggy backing on the fracking methods developed for oil. I expect geothermal to become widely adopted before fusion is ready. Or, at least it would be if people in power stopped ignoring it. It’s cheaper, and there are no big issues that we can’t see a clear path toward solving with current engineering knowledge.
The problem is geothermal is very limited by location and fusion is still decades away. We need both to contribute but one will always be an insignificant percentage and the other will be too late: we need to get carbon neutral faster than fusion can help us get there
The german article on the renewable energy transition ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende ) discusses this quite well. You don’t need any storage or other measures up to 30% electricity from solar and wind. This means, you just feed into the grid and nothing bad happens. Gas power plants would throttle their output automatically as they already do to match demand.
From 30% to 70% you can do simply with adaptive demand, i.e. making big industrial consumers run when there’s ample cheap electricity and throttle them when there’s not. No storage needed here either.
Seasonal storage is only needed for the last 30% of the renewable energy transition. Methods discussed today include synthetic fuels made from excess renewable energy when it is available. There’s already methods for chemical synthesis discussed in the literature. Let’s worry about it when we get to it.
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
when the sun doesn’t shines you are usually supposed to go to sleep
The size of Germany, Poland, Finland, or Italy
😄
First, pretty weird to go with 4 examples
Second, those 4 are of VASTLY different sizes by “my country isn’t one of the 5 largest in the world” standards. The difference in size between Germany and Italy is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
Third, even IF those countries were roughly the same size, they’re of such disparate shapes that the comparison would STILL be pretty much useless as a reference point to most people.
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I hope this is only to put things in perspectives because cars suck for a multitude of other reasons, however we power them.
We can use solar energy to move a box that weighs 1/2 tons around, for every individual on the planet. The cars will still shed microplastics. The cars will still require paved parking lots that are not permeable, worsening floods, and generate heat islands. The cars will still kill one or two billion animals every year. The cars will still kill about a million people worldwide every year; one every 30 seconds.
It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.
It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.
Cars are not the the problem you think they are, there is a lot more dirty emissions from shipping and flying.
