Tokelau Becomes First Country To Go 100% Solar 252
First time accepted submitter zonky writes "Tokelau has become the first country in the world to go 100% solar power generation, moving away from their entirely diesel power supply, which formerly supplied the energy needs of the 1400 residents of their small south pacific Island Nation. From the article: 'All three atolls in the South Pacific dependency, a New Zealand territory, will have their own solar power system by the end of October, despite a slight delay switching on the first system.'"
Hawii (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why is because right now, nearly ALL of Hawaii's energy is from oil.
Tesla could jump the production line to an easy 30K or even 40K for the model S and would still sell 100% of those cars on Hawaii.
Oddly, Hawaii is setting up free electrical charging posts.
Re:Hawii (Score:5, Insightful)
The cheapest Tesla car starts at ~$50k, not really within reach of the average citizen.
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And how do Hawaii's income levels compare with the national average? I'm guessing it's on the higher side.
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I doubt that's true after you factor the fact that virtually everything has to be shipped in. So, they may make more money nominally, but I doubt it goes as far as you expect.
Re:Hawii (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost everything I buy in the continental US is shipped/flown in, as well, from sardines to salmon, mandarins to garlic, as well as small appliances and almost everything electronic (including wire), and of course cars.
It seems to me that the only thing I routinely spend my money on that is produced domestically is gasoline (which may or may not be made from domestic crude), warm-blooded meat, and [some] vegetables.
Everything else comes over on a boat or a plane.
Hawaii may not be as relatively bad off as you implicitly suggest.
Re:Hawii (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/state/hawaii [bestplaces.net]
According to that page, the cost of living is over 75% higher then average for the US mainland. I was told when i vacationed there 20 some years ago, it was because everything is shipped in.
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Everything else comes over on a boat or a plane.
Economies of scale. It comes over on a whacking great container ship along with 49,999 other identical items.
Re:Hawii (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost everything I buy in the continental US is shipped/flown in
Most of your food is grown domestically, not just meat. Vegetable oil comes from corn, soybeans, or canola, all three of which we export megatons of, most vegetables are grown here as well.
Copper, gold, bauxite, and other mined materials also come from here. The US is blessed with an abundance of raw materials. Your wire and pipes are likely produced domestically [google.com] (I used to work at that factory). "Japanese" and "Korean" autos are built in the US, as well as domestic models.
US manufacturing's death has been greatly exaggerated.
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Almost everything I buy in the continental US is shipped/flown in, as well, from sardines to salmon, mandarins to garlic, as well as small appliances and almost everything electronic (including wire), and of course cars.
Even if that is true in your case (and is most certainly is not true for most Americans), there are a host of things you indirectly consume that are surely made in the 48 states.
Your electricity comes mostly from coal and natural gas that all came from within the country. That car you said was shipped in? Well, you may own an import, but most Americans do not. And even imported cars might have been made here. Toyota, and many others, have plants in the USA. You ever eat bread? The gra
Re:Hawii (Score:5, Informative)
And how do Hawaii's income levels compare with the national average? I'm guessing it's on the higher side.
Although the 2003 median income of $71,320 for a family of 4 in Hawaii was higher than the national figure of $65,093, this is still below the amount required to maintain the same standard of living for a family of 4 in Hawaii as elsewhere in America [alternative-hawaii.com]
Re:Hawii (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hawii (Score:4, Insightful)
The cheapest Tesla car starts at ~$50k, not really within reach of the average citizen.
Add 10 years worth of ever-rising gas prices to that cost, and that sticker becomes a hell of a lot less shocking to the average citizen (especially if free electrical charging posts are available in the area)
Add mass-production to that model and drop the cost by $10 - $15K.
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Yeah, you wonder why HI hasn't invested more heavily in solar and wind. There are spots on the islands where the wind is just about always going strong. No shortage of sun on the leeward side of any Hawaiian island. And oil makes electricity there very expensive. So if solar and wind are even vaguely close to cost effective, why hasn't Hawaii invested heavily?
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Because the very expensive oil is still cheaper than the 'cost effective' solar and wind?
Just because you use the words 'very expensive' and 'cost effective' doesn't make it so.
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Re:Hawii (Score:4, Insightful)
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It might be because I'm a techie, but I don't have any problems with tastefully done solar panels, and it's my understanding that solar thermal for hot water is a requirement for new housing there anyways.
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Re:Hawii (Score:5, Funny)
Me neither.
Plus, if I lived in Hawaii, I'd hardly even use electricity. My ukulele doesn't plug in and the only juice sitting in a hammock requires is pineapple. And how would you even install AC outlets in a little grass shack?
I'd catch my own tuna for sushi and rarely wear clothes and me and my wahine would watch the humuhumunukunukuapua go swimming by...
I'm sorry, I drifted off for a minute there.
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Beer doesn't cool itself.
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Have you ever seen an oil-fired or coal-fired power plant?
Trust me, they're a lot less pleasant to look at (or smell) than solar panels or wind turbines.
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Doesn't Hawaii also have really good geothermal potential?
Re:Hawii (Score:5, Informative)
It's trying, but there's a number of roadblocks, mostly regulatory. There's a big paperwork backlog - 3/4ths of the permit applications in Honolulu are for rooftop solar installs. Also, it was just recently that they overturned the law banning more than 15% of the grid's capacity to be from home rooftops without getting an explicit exception (it's now 25%). Before that, you had to do a long interconnect impact study for each install. Getting paid for sending power back into the grid is fairly new itself, less than a year old. On the commercial side, the utilities are building most of their new capacity as renewables, but they don't want to toss away their investment on older generation hardware. So overall it's just moving at a snail's pace.
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The basic problem is how to store energy for when generation lags. This is the most expensive aspect of the so called green power systems and remains the knottiest problem.
Throw up all the solar panels you want but you still have to have capacity to run things after dark. Efficient storage is the stumbling block, not generation.
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Geothermal. Last I checked, Hawaii was a chain of volcanic islands. And geothermal is (iirc) a very stable, reliable power source, good for base load.
Between geothermal, solar (it's very bright in Hawaii), tidal, and wind (lots of off-shore for off-shore wind farms), Hawaii would be a really good place to test (and prove) renewable power. It even has an economic edge there it won't have elsewhere - shipping oil, coal or natural gas to Hawaii by boat is far more expensive than shipping it by ground elsewhere
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Really I wonder why Hawaii has not invested heavily in geothermal. Would seem like an almost idea location...
Re:Hawii (Score:4, Informative)
Among other reasons, it's faced opposition from native Hawaiians. [hawaiinewsdaily.com] Drilling into Pele and all that...
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Why would Hawaii bother with solar & wind when they're sitting on a geothermal hot spot?
Heating & electricity in Hawaii should be almost free with the amount of available energy they have.
What about OTEC ? (Score:2)
What about Hawaii's "old" NELHA 220 kW Ocean Thermal Energy conversion plant [hawaii.edu] off the Kona coast ?
OTEC solutions are apparently still alive in Hawaii, as a project and funding for building another more powerful OTEC plant off Maui's coast [gizmag.com] was awarded in 2010 to Lockheed Martin, and NELHA is aiming to build a second plant [westhawaiitoday.com] by 2014.
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I just ran across an article discussing this very issue. It turns out that the price of solar in Hawaii is already financially viable without any extra incentives, and with incentives many areas are hitting the current maximum of 15% solar per interconnection.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2012/08/hawaii-drives-past-solar-power-cost-barrier-surprised-by-additional-roadblocks [renewableenergyworld.com]
That post and the associated report covers the issues of increasing solar in Hawaii better than I can.
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I don't know about 15%, but I can certainly understand wanting to be cautious - their electricity might be mostly oil, but that doesn't mean those generators can scale up/down on a dime - more than x% might cause problems with the grid.
Now, I'd think that 20% would be no problem(due to average power increase during the day), but somebody higher up mentioned that the rule was recently amended to 25%. I haven't done any studies specifically for Hawaii.
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It is amazing that the USA is NOT investing more into getting Hawaii moved onto AE for energy
Because it's run by oil barons. If they start with green energy over there, people might start demanding it over here....
Mod AC up (Score:2)
S/He needs the visibility !
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I have a friend who lives on Hawaii and his entire house is powered by solar.
Pushing the entire archipelago to wind or solar, however, is another story altogether. Doing it for an island with a population of 1400 is a far cry to doing it for 1.3 million spread across several islands.
What do you suggest? Clear cutting huge swaths of forest to install solar panels and wind turbines?
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It helps... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that far from saying something like Sealand is the first nation to adopt bitcoin as a national currency, which I am sure they would if they thought they could profit off it.
Re:It helps... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like saying Tokelau is the first village to go solar but then it wouldn't be news.
Re:It helps... (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, while they may be the first to be essentially 100% solar, they're far from the first to go essentially 100% renewable. Here in Iceland we're essentially 100% geo and hydro for our electricity. Yeah, we're only 320,000 people, but we produce 2/3rds as much power as Ireland (which has 15 times our population). A huge amount of electricity per-capita goes to industry (it's so cheap, electricity-intensive industries like aluminum come here). Of the three aluminum smelters in the country, even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. And we're only at something like 20% of our hydro capacity, 25% of our known conventional geo capacity (plus, geo's not been nearly well enough explored, this doesn't count enhanced geothermal, it doesn't count low-temperature geothermal, and it doesn't count geothermal straight from lava**), the largest wind turbine in this super-windy country is only 30kW, and wave and tidal (there are big waves and tides here) are completely untapped.
Note that electricity isn't the only form of energy that people use. Like I'm sure is the case with Tokelau, we import almost all of our fuel (although there's some new biofuels plants going online which should start to change that here). Also, most of our primary energy is heat. Geothermal currently makes up only a quarter of our electricity production, but it's 2/3rds of our primary energy production (most of it being low temperature geo which we've done nothing to produce electricity from - the water comes out of the wells at usually 100-140C and gets blended with cold water down to the 80C distribution temperature - power is so cheap and abundant here that nobody can justify the cost to generate power from low temperature geo). Fossil fuels (mainly oil) make up about 20% of our primary energy consumption.
Having such a high percent of our primary energy production as heat, not transportation fuels or electricity, certainly is unusual, but then again, we love us some hot water and use it aplenty ;) Also, the geothermal heat displaces electric and/or oil/natural gas room and water heating in homes and businesses.
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** It was actually discovered by accident that we can produce geo straight from lava when a geo well at the Krafla volcanic system accidentally drilled into the lava dome. The lava backed up the well a couple dozen meters and then stopped. At first considering the well a loss, they decided to try to turn it into a production well, and it turned out that it actually works. ;)
Re:It helps... (Score:4, Insightful)
It has to do with the fact that hydrogen fuel is a stupid idea, and while the concept that it is never really sank in, the effects of it (aka, the lack of nearly any hydrogen vehicles, let alone affordable ones) did. So Iceland has been pushing a bit more toward EVs, although not hard yet. I plug my car in the EV charging station at Kringlan - but that's the only one I know of (I'm sure there are more, but they're not common).
It'll come in time.
That maybe isn't important (Score:3)
I'm not sure if the size of population matters - with more population, you have more money. So the question is, how does the economics of the system scale on a per-capita basis?
If it's affordable on a per-capita basis for 1400 people, why not 140 million people?
It's an interesting experiment at a small scale which will help answer either if solar is viable (technically and financially) at a smaller scale, or not.
I would point out that I doubt that this tiny pacific island has much in the way of heavy indust
Soon to become 100% hydro (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sadly Tokelau will be the first nation to go under the waves when the waters rise. I've met a few Tokelauans and they are uniformly terrific people. Their culture will pretty much vanish when migrate to New Zealand.and their kids become Kiwis (New Zelanders - the fruit is named after the people who are named after the bird).
Not all bad. Just imagine being able to go fishing in your living room!
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the fruit is named after the people who are named after the bird.
I find that startling considering how much more the fruit looks like the bird than it does the people.
Maybe you will find it even more startling to learn that kiwi fruit doesn't even come from New Zealand. They originated in China.
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And an easy, tasty treat.
http://slightlyodd.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/How_to_prepare_a_kiwi.jpg [slightlyodd.com]
They have taken the attribution off the image and reposted it, swiped from on old tshirt http://www.globalculture.co.nz/ [globalculture.co.nz]
Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Well PV actually is quite cost effective against the carbon alternatives in this case. Not only is the country small making this project quite easy, but it's in the middle of nowhere so shipping costs for carbon based energy sources were equal to the cost of energy itself. One article mentioned that they were spending $800000 on shipping $1m worth of diesel every year.
I can see how solar PV could pay for itself quite quickly in this case.
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I'm surprised they didn't throw in any Solar Thermal [wikipedia.org] power generation. Especially at such a low latitude, it seems like it would really complement the PV. Are they too small to get a cost effective utility-size installation? The article mentions
The solar power systems will be capable of providing 150 per cent of the annual electricity demand without increasing diesel demand.
so they're already building over current demand.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
"Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel."
This argument gets really old. Maybe you can provide that number yourself, with a reference. The 1st time I looked it up (ca 2003), energy parity was reached in 1-2 years depending on the local insolation.
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For non-silicon based, it's often under 6 months. And actually solar is usually awfully nice as far as renewable impacts on the grid go, as it roughly tracks people's power consumption demands (several times more power used in the day than at night, more power used on hot, sunny days, etc). And with oil power and those sort of shipping costs, they must have been paying many times the US average for electricity. Solar and batteries should be a no-brainer in terms of payoff time.
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Clearly you live in a hot sunny place. Large percentages of the worlds population use more energy in the cold dark nights of winter when the sun is useless.
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Not people in the sort of sunny areas that tend to be the early adopters of solar technology. Their power is primarily in the summer, for air conditioning.
I live in Iceland. We get our heat from geo and our power from a geo/hydro blend.
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Well, exactly the same "power will fail" scenario will happen if someone uses all the diesel before the supply ship arrives, or the generator fails or...
Redundancy is a good thing in any critical infrastructure.
On the other hand, on-going cash-flow requirements for fossil fuel are dealt with quite nicely by doing this.
"A lot of maintenance" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry but that's a load of crap. Solar panels don't require any maintenance unless you live in a very dirty environment and even cheap inverters will still outlive the return on investment duration. If your inverter breaks more often then once every 5 years then you need to seriously question about what brands you buy.
Also you've clearly never lived on a small island in the pacific have you? I have. The expectation was quite simple. At 10pm the power went out. If we were lucky there would be blackouts at dinner time too. This isn't some high tech civilisation who cry bloody murder when their broadband connection goes down.
Also cost effective is not questionable, not in the slightest. The case has been made. The plant cost $7.5m the annual expenditure on diesel is $1.8m. It would be paid off within 4 years without any kind of subsidy or assistance, except in this case the NZ government is providing the money. The country has just managed to pocket $1.8m / year which is 2/3rds of their national budget. That sounds like cost effective to me.
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Nope. According to wikipedia, most of the money spent on those islands is subsidies provided by New Zealand.
So New Zealand will come out ahead in four years, assuming that a typhoon hasn't obliterated the panels in that time.
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> Solar panels do require a lot of maintenance if you want good performance.
Compared to a small diesel plan? Definitely not.
> Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel.
Energy parity is achieved quicker for solar panels than for nuclear power plants in some cases.
Accoring to this source by the German government, CO2 emissions of a nuclear plant driven by Uranium from South Africa
were higher than those of solar panels in 2007.
http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/anal [bundestag.de]
not a country (Score:2, Informative)
It's a territory of NZ.
And it's apparently not at all on solar yet, the first system turns on in two weeks, the last in October.
I'm not even going to grouse about the 3 cars that run on fossil fuel, because that's peanuts next to the fact that the country won't even have power 24 hours a day (article says 12-18h).
This article is just plain wrong.
Re:not a country (Score:5, Informative)
You are reading it wrong. Currently they don't have electricity 24/7 because they don't run the generators all night. Once solar is running they will have electricity available all the time thanks to battery storage.
It also means they are not reliant on incoming shipments of diesel to keep the lights on, and their power system is now distributed and far more redundant than when it was reliant on a small number of generators.
Overall this is a huge upgrade for them.
It's a closed system (Score:4, Interesting)
More solar bashing (Score:5, Insightful)
don't abide the propagandized fools (Score:3)
there's a certain segment of society that listens to faux news and reads the drudge report and faithfully accepts the propaganda from the oligopolies who want to retain their rent-seeking parasite status on our societies. why these people's minds are so beholden to the corporate propaganda and the well-paid demagogues is beyond my understanding. some people retain open minds, other minds close up and never think critically again, and are forever more enthralled to the propaganda channels that, for some reas
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There are some people who's heads would explode if they ever admitted that the hippies were, in fact, right about this sort of thing.
A proud people (Score:2)
That's just great! (Score:2)
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Which is more preferable than browsing bad porn on cheap .tk domains.
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Vanadium redox cells are typically cited as over 10000 cycles. I don't know what simulations you refer to, but given that the average US household uses 6000kWh/year, that's an average of 0.7kW, and assuming an average of 3 people per household would mean that 1MWh per person (3 MWh per household) would be enough to run it for 180 days. Which sounds utterly absurd, especially once you start building more regional interconnects (heck, they're already talking about adding even *Iceland* to the European grid)
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However 1MWh does seem well over the top. Even if we all needed a few tons of Aluminum from the local smelter a year.
Pumped hydro is rather expensive (billions for somethi
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And? You think there's not the fraction of a percent of land that isn't flat?
Try crunching the numbers some time on how much power can be stored in the US just from the small difference between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan-Huron. It's pretty starggering, despite them being in the Great Plains.
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Guess how much energy is in 10000 tons of depleted U? Its a lot. Oh yes its a lot...
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In case you didn't notice, the Great Lakes already exist.
And nobody's talking about recreating them elsewhere.
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1) Quite true. Nonetheless, the figure is still quite extreme. The *entire day*'s power consumption for *50 days*? I mean, that's ridiculous, especially on an interconnected grid. If the sun's not shining in Germany, it's probably shining in Morrocco. If the wind isn't blowing in Scotland, it's probably blowing in Greece. Etc. And for those rare cases when *all types* of renewables are underperforming at the *same time*, you then fire up fossil peaking to make up that ~5% or so of your total electric
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2) While wind doesn't track consumption requirements, solar generally does pretty well. Inter-seasonal variations are handled by geographic and generation-mix diversity.
This depends on your location. For Denmark wind actually tracks consumption very well. The country uses much more electricity during the cold winter months compared to summer. And wind produces more during winter as well. If the country were to build 100% wind about 70% of the power would be produced when needed.
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3. Currently, Germany is in a "20% scenario". We already have the highest electricity prices in the world (for a major country) ~26 âct/kWh and the import/export saldo in the area of 15% of total production. The electricity prices will likely increase by another 3-4 cents next year and so far there's no end to the price hike in sight.
Germany might be a horrible example as the political system there seems to insist making bad choices while shutting down the nuclear powerplants.
Look at your northern neighbours instead: Denmark. In the year 2011 the electricity used in Denmark was 28% wind and 11% other renewable energy (solar, biomass, imported hydroelectric power from Sweden and Norway, etc). 41% of electricity produced in Denmark was from renewable sources while only 39% electricity used was from renewable sources. This is because Denma
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Land area for pumped storage. As described in my post above, a 95-5 solution should take no more than a couple days buffer, perhaps 60kWh per person. Germany's population is about 82m. Assume an average height difference of 100m, only two-reservoir plants (we'll assume no coastal plants), assuming an average reservoir depth of 20m, and a throughput efficiency of 80%, we get 15,7MJ/m = 4,4kWh/m = 13,8 m^2/person = 1132km^2. Germany is 357021 km^2. The lake requirement is a third of a percent of the size
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A fridge left closed should have insulating properties be able to keep food from spoiling for a good 24 hours. So not having power overnight shouldn't be a problem as long as everyone's asleep and not getting midnight snacks.
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A fridge left closed should have insulating properties be able to keep food from spoiling for a good 24 hours.
Also, they know when the sun is going down, so they could use the daytime electricity to "pre-chill" the fridge below its normal temperature, so it doesn't warm above a safe level overnight. Many companies that run refrigerators do the opposite: they use cheap overnight base-load electricity to pre-chill, so they need less electricity during the day when rates are higher.
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Maybe so....but if I work a night shift and therefore sleep during the day, I better have electricity at night/early morning. If its available 18 hours a day....that ain't happening.
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Yeah, and some idiot shooting a nobody Viscount and his Wife in Serbia, started World War One. From small things, world changing events unfold. Who knows, being the first might provide them with some special status in the future, or help make something else possible because we learned from their example.
Every activity and accomplishment is a learning experience. I hope there *is* something the world can gain from this. That's not sarcasm.
I'm simply pointing out the obvious, that although a first and a possible inspiration and benefit to others, it's no leap-ahead in engineering or scaling.
I know that we've had a history of disagreements on a number of topics on /. in the past and almost certainly will again, but allow me to agree with you when there is common ground. I'm not unreasonable, even though we ha
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Falls in the same category as Guam and American Somoa so it understandable
Actually it falls in the same category as American Somoa, but not Guam. Residents of Guam are US citizens. Residents of American Somoa are not.
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What does that have to do with being a country of not?
Curiously, I am a New Zealander and this island is New Zealand territory with the New Zealand mainland funding the entire project and being constructed by New Zealand companies.
So, as a matter of fact, it is MY country ...
BTW - nice troll on the anti-USA war/oil thing ... a nice old standard ... i rate 3/10 for effort
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There are actually a fair number of boats that have TVs running off DC.
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When it comes to electronics devices typically a PSU which converts AC into (lower voltage) DC is used. Sometimes this is internal, sometimes it is an external component. Even over 30 years ago it was possible to find TVs which operated on 12V DC. It would be rather easier to do this with an LCD than a CRT.
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Re:pointless achievement (Score:5, Informative)
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> Also this BS argument I constantly see without facts to back it up that some how solar cells release so much CO2 in their manufacture that they can't possibly offset the CO2 over their lives.
You here the same for energy saving light bulbs, etc.
As a first ballpark estimate you can assume that even manufacturers have to pay for their energy. So if it is economical feasible the CO2 balance can't be that bad.
Actual there is data on that available. It is called energy pay back time. It is less than a year f
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I read this a few year ago and current can't find it again.
It might be that this number ist the energy for producing the plant divided by the average electrical power. This would mean that the energy for running the plant and for producing the fuel is not considerd. Sorry I don't have a better source.
What I do find a lot are sources on the average amount of CO2 produced by nuclear power. It is a lot worse than wind and hydro but somewhat better than solar if the uranium does not come from south africa.
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