Researchers Solve Scientific Puzzle That Could Improve Solar Panel Efficiency (phys.org) 170
New solar panels created from a semiconducting material called cadmium telluride (CdTe) "have been found to produce electricity at lower costs than silicon panels and there has been a dramatic gain in efficiency brought about by adding an element called selenium to the cadmium telluride," reports Phys.Org. "Until now, it was not well understood why selenium increases efficiency but thanks to Tom Fiducia, a Ph.D. Research Student in the Center for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST), and an international team of researchers, the puzzle has been solved." From the report: Their paper, titled "Understanding the role of selenium in defect passivation for highly efficient selenium-alloyed cadmium telluride solar cells," has revealed that selenium works by overcoming the effect of harmful, atomic-scale defects in CdTe panels. This explains the increase of efficiency as electrons (subatomic particles that carry electricity), which are generated when sunlight hits the solar panel, are less likely to be trapped and lost at the defects. This increases the amount of power extracted.
Tom, who is the lead author of the paper, says the team discovered this "unexpected" behavior by measuring how much light is emitted from selenium-containing panels. As selenium is not evenly distributed across the panels, they compared the 'luminescence' emitted from areas where there was little-to-no selenium present and areas where the selenium was very concentrated. Tom explained: "While it seems counter intuitive, good solar cell material that is defect-free is very efficient at emitting light, and so luminesces strongly. We mapped the luminescence emitted from a selenium-containing solar cell at a resolution of around 1/10,000th of a millimeter and compared it to a similarly high-resolution map of the selenium concentration taken on the exact same area of the cell. It is strikingly obvious when you see the data that selenium-rich regions luminesce much more brightly than the pure cadmium telluride, and the effect is remarkably strong." The new-found knowledge could be used to increase the efficiency of cadmium telluride solar panels even further, says Tom. "For instance, this could be by simply increasing the amount of selenium in the devices or altering its distributions within the cell."
Tom, who is the lead author of the paper, says the team discovered this "unexpected" behavior by measuring how much light is emitted from selenium-containing panels. As selenium is not evenly distributed across the panels, they compared the 'luminescence' emitted from areas where there was little-to-no selenium present and areas where the selenium was very concentrated. Tom explained: "While it seems counter intuitive, good solar cell material that is defect-free is very efficient at emitting light, and so luminesces strongly. We mapped the luminescence emitted from a selenium-containing solar cell at a resolution of around 1/10,000th of a millimeter and compared it to a similarly high-resolution map of the selenium concentration taken on the exact same area of the cell. It is strikingly obvious when you see the data that selenium-rich regions luminesce much more brightly than the pure cadmium telluride, and the effect is remarkably strong." The new-found knowledge could be used to increase the efficiency of cadmium telluride solar panels even further, says Tom. "For instance, this could be by simply increasing the amount of selenium in the devices or altering its distributions within the cell."
Silicon cells are super cheap (Score:4, Informative)
I recently looked at wholesale prices of solar cells and it can be as low as 14 cents per Watt. The rest of the panel - support and protection also adds to the cost, but it makes DIY panels made from second hand wooden window frames quite worth the effort.
Re: Silicon cells are super cheap (Score:2)
...but it makes DIY panels made from second hand wooden window frames quite worth the effort.
Look, I'm part Scottish with possible Austrian crypto-Jew in my blood so I know all about trying to save money... at least get yourself some fucking 1x2's so your working dimensions aren't limited to your used, dry-rotted windows... and learn some perspective; if you're too cheap, you'll end up 'stepping over twenties to pick up pennies.'
Re: Silicon cells are super cheap (Score:5, Informative)
To me, there is "penny wise, but pound foolish." From years of doing stuff with RVs, solar panels are a one time expense. Either you want the best panels you can to cover the little square footage you have available, or you want a lot of inexpensive panels covering the roof of a larger rig. Because solar panels are installed once and that's it, price savings on the panels themselves can cost a lot more in the long run, just due to the long service life of panels.
Panels tend to not be the expensive part. Wiring, MPPT converters, inverters, and batteries are the expensive parts, and the stuff that breaks.
Re: Looks misinterpreted (Score:1)
PhD. Whatever
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Appeal to authority logical fallacy. Whatever
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Luminescence. Whatever.
I think the spelling you're looking for is:
Luminecents
Re: Silicon cells are super cheap (Score:4)
True, but a couple decades ago articles about better battery and electric drive technologies soon making electric cars affordable would have been lumped into this category... and now I'm driving one an hour each way to/from work with plenty of charge to spare.
So don't lose hope.
Wow (Score:1)
electrons (subatomic particles that carry electricity),
Everyday that I learn something new is a good day. But the day I learned the role of electrons was in fourth grade which was thirty nine fucking years ago.
Does any editor actually read it before approving a post's content these days? Thanks anyway for causing me to count how many years passed since elementary school...
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Given the "layers of abstraction" approach taught to many developers, I'm afraid I'd be unsurprised if a few of them really didn't understand enough physics to realize that electricity is normally carried by electrons.
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Electricity is carried by holes. Electrons are going the wrong way.
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Oh, dear. If we're gong that way, elecricity is carried by electrical charge. The electricity in nerves is normally carried by ion transfer.
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I remember a poor electronics instructor from a classroom in the last century, who was on the verge of pulling out his a few remaining hairs out; While we were deliberately "not understanding" why a P/N junction does not cause all holes and electrons rushing towards each other destroy semiconductor properties of the whole diode 3:) After all one element has extra electrons, and other need those electrons in order to fill holes and there is a current that carries electrons
"Sir our (more experie
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electrons (subatomic particles that carry electricity), which are generated
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on the 'electrons are generated' part. They are freed, not generated. Which would be quite a feat of particle physics to pull off in a PV panel.
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What could go wrong? (Score:1)
Cadmium... a highly toxic heavy metal that causes cancer and other diseases... lets mass produce a fragile, limited life-span product containing the stuff and distribute it over hundreds of thousands of square Kms of earth's surface.
What could go wrong?
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Cadmium... a highly toxic heavy metal that causes cancer and other diseases...
Yes... when inhaled or ingested. Do you think we're going to burn or eat solar cells?
limited life-span product
25 years is now considered a limited life-span? I mean, they still work at 80% efficiency after that but that's when solar cells are "end of life".
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If the houses that have them on their roofs burn down, yes.
(not to say that's intended, but it should be a concern with houses that commonly burn down)
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If solar panels contain toxic chemicals, and there is no financial incentive to properly dispose of them (e.g. refundable deposit), but instead there is a fee to pay for proper recycling, do you think most of them would not end up in a dump?
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I would mod you up if I had mod points today. It is very easy to forget to consider what will happen over the course of decades. What you describe is exactly what happens.
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Solar panels pretty much work until they're physically broken. They put out less power, but they just get sold as used and with buyers knowing that they won't provide rated wattage. If you get them at 1/3 the cost, it's not a problem that they only provide 4/5 of rated output. I've got several old panels that I use for charging small devices, batteries, etc. You can literally pair the 12V ones with a 24V-capable car charger and nothing else to make a USB charger, but I bought a bare module with screw termin
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Selenium is not toxic, its even added in suplements to boost the immune system. But cadmium and Tellurium are toxic.
Selenium being toxic and also a nutrient are not incompatible statements. "The dose makes the poison", as they say. People have died of iron poisoning from taking too much.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Toxicity of cadmium is an environmental concern (Score:4, Insightful)
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Toxicity of cadmium is an environmental concern we have to deal later with. =/
Yes, inhaling and ingesting cadmium is bad. Do you think we're going to burn or eat solar cells?
Re:Toxicity of cadmium is an environmental concern (Score:4, Insightful)
Houses catch fire from time to time.
It's just barely possible that a house with solar cells made with cadmium might do so one of these days.
Which means that it's just barely possible that inhaling cadmium might be an issue by and by.
If we apply the Nuclear Power Rule (even one death is too many), then the possibility of a death should preclude the use of the stuff.
That said, this stuff might be very useful in space.
Or Third World countries with way fewer lawyers chasing ambulances than we have....
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If we apply the Nuclear Power Rule (even one death is too many), then the possibility of a death should preclude the use of the stuff.
I get your point but has the "Nuclear Power Rule" stopped chemical spills in the US?
What about explosions on off shore oil rigs or at refineries?
How about trains hauling chemicals that derail and catch fire?
etc, etc...
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I think we will. Buildings catch fire. Demolition waste ends up in garbage sites. Garbage is sometimes burned. Garbage is also exposed to rain, which carries particles into both surface and ground water. (Relatedly, now that we are looking for them, we know that plastics have found their way into our drinking water supplies.)
So, I think the answer is yes. We probably will burn and eat solar cells.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride#Toxicology_assessment [wikipedia.org]
Apparently that is not too much of a concern.
Chloride can be nasty, but is widely used in combination with Na
Follow the resources... (Score:2)
Unless there's enough cadmium, tellurium, and selenium to actually facilitate putting CdTeSe panels on every rooftop, this is just another in a very VERY long line of cell-efficiency dick measuring contests.
Re:Follow the resources... (Score:4, Informative)
The quantities needed are fairly negligible compared to the amount of Cd, Te and Se ending up in copper, zinc and lead slags. So I don't think we have to worry too much about that. The recent studies running scare campaigns about this have used very flawed methods and don't understand primary metal supply chains very well (how could we possibly produce 3 times current production ?!?!?!? actually relatively easily, as for by-product metals it's largely a matter of increasing recovery from existing industrial waste streams rather than a lack of geologic availability).
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My allusion was that for too long there has been a disproportionate focus on panel efficiency rather than panel cost, which is the single largest barrier to widespread usage. If I had a quarter for every breathless announcement of increased cell efficiency I've read in the last 15 years, I could take a very luxurious cruise. I took note of the claimed cost reduction here, being so out of character for most such announcements, but it's moot if there's no supply chain to back it up. Let's hope you're right
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My allusion was that for too long there has been a disproportionate focus on panel efficiency rather than panel cost, which is the single largest barrier to widespread usage. If I had a quarter for every breathless announcement of increased cell efficiency I've read in the last 15 years, I could take a very luxurious cruise. I took note of the claimed cost reduction here, being so out of character for most such announcements, but it's moot if there's no supply chain to back it up. Let's hope you're right.
The efficiency of PV systems has doubled since the mid 90's and the cost has dropped from by a full two thirds. It's the fall in prices that has contributed just as much as the efficiency increase to making PV systems so competitive.
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As ever... until I can buy it, until I can hold in my hands a solar panel of the alleged efficiency, then it's all just hot air.
Battery capacity. Solar efficiency. ICE cleanliness. Teleporters. Affordable 3D printers that'll use any material.
All hot air. Every week there's another paper and another experiment and another breakthrough.
I can still only buy lead-acid, alkaline, NiCd, NiMH, Li-Ion and Li-poly, though.
And those technologies still don't have anywhere near a decent capacity increase in consum
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I share the same sentiments. This is all just academic dick-measuring and career positioning, and our hopes are being dragged along for the ride. It's the aftermath of Apollo 11 all over again.
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Still, today, I can't find a single AA battery on Amazon that beats that capacity, using any technology.
According to the data sheet [energizer.com], Energizer's L91 AA lithium cells are rated for 3500 mAh. Not rechargable, though, and if you pull a lot of current (1A), they drop down closer to 3000 mAh.
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The flip side of this is that everything you now hold in your grubby little hands was somebody else's hot air, once upon a time.
IBM "pixie dust" breaks hard drive barrier [cnet.com] — 2 January 2002
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CdTe cells are already quite wide spread. ...
And you can be assured the planet is not running out of metals or other elements soon
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I am not assured of that, and CdTE panels already being widespread does nothing if not increase the concern. How much of those elements now is locked away permanently in cells that will likely never see the inside of an appropriate recycling plant?
Not running out of metals? You'll change your tune when someone steals the catalytic converter from your SUV or the plumbing and wiring from under your house.
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Good for them! (Score:2)
Stepping away from the current argument raging over this article already....
I say good for them! I'm not a "greenie", and I believe that we should use all available and commercially viable forms of energy, whether that is coal, oil, nuke, hydro, wind, solar, sodium reactors, etc. If it works, and is economically affordable, then go for it!
Now, having said that, I have no issues at all transitioning away from hydrocarbon based energy sources to "green" ones, as long as they are commercially and economicall
Re:Selenium fills the gaps (Score:5, Informative)
Selenium and Tellurium are chemically similar. Both are chalcogens [wikipedia.org] that sit just below sulfur on the periodic table. Selenium is a bit smaller, and bonds a bit tighter, so it makes sense that it could fill in the defects. Both are relatively cheap. Selenium is about $120/kg and tellurium is about $30/kg, but that goes a long way in the thin layers used in solar cells.
Tellurium is a byproduct of lead and copper mining, and cadmium is a byproduct of zinc mining. So it is unclear if either can be economically scaled up to AGW-mitigating levels.
Re:Selenium fills the gaps (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to replace all power production deemed harmful with PV, the average European country is probably looking at plastering a third to half its area with cells.
Nonsense. The average EU citizen needs about 150 m^2 of solar panels to provide their power needs, and roof area alone could provide half of that.
In America, all our power needs could be met with with an area about 200 miles square: About one sixth of Arizona. Again, roofs, could provide about half of that.
The problem is transmission and storage, not "land area". People don't live in the sunniest areas, and it gets dark at night.
Not a big problem though. (Score:1, Interesting)
More a "we don't want to change our ways" problem.
HVDC got you covered. Siemens would have been the contractor to do it for the trans-European project that died with the Arab revolutions.
You Americans have enough sun and wind in your own country, and the one usually works when the other doesn't.
For storage, a properly managed dam is almost perfect.
Make sure it does not turn into a swamp, and provide a small creek, serpentining down the side, for the fish, and there is no way you're gonna find any other stor
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In Germany, the expected power generated per sq meter is 100kWh a year.
The average German Citizen uses about 1750 kWh a year only in household electricity.
According to a slide from Uni Tuebingen I found they calculate that each person uses about 130kWhs of Electricity each day (including transportation as well as goods like food, clothing and other consumer goods).
130kwH a day is 47450. Divided by one hundred is 475 square meters of area that needs to get PV.
For 80 million people that brings me to a total
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"yay, it's cheaper, let's use more of it".
This is Jevon's Paradox [wikipedia.org]. As energy efficiency goes up, it creates economic growth, which can increase overall demand despite the greater efficiency.
So electricity demand is rising, but electricity demand per unit of GDP is falling throughout most of the world.
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Seems like we're increasing GDP faster now we're moving to renewables, if you are correct.
Yes, but the big efficiency gains are not coming from renewables. They are coming from more efficient devices: LED light bulbs, flat screens replacing CRTs, VSDC motors replacing AC-Induction motors, etc.
What would really make a big difference in much of the world is cheap and efficient air conditioners. ACs are the biggest source of growth in electricity consumption, and many of them have terrible energy efficiency.
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And this is the problem with anecdote...
No son.
The conversion process also produces heat.
You also don't get a free ride from the general environment either.
A 110 degree day is a 110 degree day.
The surface area under your panel array is a vanishingly small portion of your net input of energy into your home.
However, take steps to air and weather seal your home.
Ensure you have sufficient insulation in the walls and the roof.
Make sure your windows have proper overhangs.
Make sure your windows are low-E coated an
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Depends on how old your home is and what it is made of. If you have a typical Arizona house (stucco with a tile roof and triple-pane windows), the bulk of your energy input comes from the sun heating the relatively dark tile material, because most of the sunlight hitting the lighter stucco gets reflected.
When you add solar panels, lots of energy is converted into electricity. What remains is r
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Most commodity-grade panels are 20-22% efficient.
"What remains" is "most of it".
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This will drastically reduce your direct solar gain. Reduced solar gain means the home doesn't heat up as much or as quickly. This means it can be controlled more easily with less HVAC input.
Yep, and he already noted that even just the roof solar array's impact is measurable. That of course doesn't mean it can't improved further, but it doesn't mean that the roof array's impact is zero either.
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Depends on the install really.
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And for those who ignore Anonymous Cowards...
RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive) is a European thing that puts restrictions on the use of certain compounds in electronic equipment. Cadmium is number 3 on the list implying that CdTe solar panels will have extra hoops to jump through that may limit their uptake.
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Commercial solar power plants in Europe already mostly use CdTe cells. ... and with sealed solar cells that is obviously super simple.
Basically you only need to make sure the bad stuff does not get into the environment
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Commercial solar power plants in Europe already mostly use CdTe cells. Basically you only need to make sure the bad stuff does not get into the environment ... and with sealed solar cells that is obviously super simple.
The problem isn't that you can't seal a solar cell. Its that you need a huge number of those solar cells and the likelihood that something leaks, breaks or otherwise escapes those sealed cells goes up with the number you have to produce. Its relatively easy to prevent a few containers of waste from leaking. Its hard to prevent a few hundred containers from leaking if they are in one place. Tens or hundreds of thousands of containers scattered across 10,000 sq kms WILL leak into the environment. The on
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Commercial solar power plants in Europe already mostly use CdTe cells.
Uh, you meant silicon cells. Practically nobody manufactures CdTe cells anymore; 2017 production was 2.3 GW worth of cells out of the total of around 100 GW sold in 2017. Europe installed 8.6 GW in 2017, and the largest CdTe producer is US-based First Solar which builds its own plants in the US. So there's no way that commercial solar power plants in Europe could mostly use CdTe cells, since there's not nearly enough of CdTe cells for that.
Re: Selenium fills the gaps (Score:2)
This was my first thought, we used to use cadmium and selenium in printer/copier drums because back in the 80's, there was no available replacement. You had to be careful how the drums were disposed of as they could be an environmental time bomb.
Then came organic and ASi drums that while expensive, lasted longer and had no toxic disposal costs.
The idea of putting heavy metal laden panels all over the country is a pretty bad idea
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The real problem is that there's not nearly enough tellurium to cover our needs
Well, this is Slashdot, so the obvious solution is asteroid mining.
Tellurium is 10,000 times more common in space than it is in the Earth's crust, where it is about as rare as platinum.
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Germany is a near worst-case scenario. It is northern and cloudy. Sunny places like Spain, Italy, Greece, and even southern France bring the EU average way down.
Even better, build solar farms in Morocco, where sunshine is plentiful and land and labor are cheap, and run HVDC across the Straits of Gibraltar (14 km). There are already proposals to do this.
Morocco can be Europe's Arizona.
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So, Europe's energy needs held hostage by both Russian natural gas and Moroccan solar energy?
OK, that's alarmist but I think there's a lot of reasons why Europe doesn't necessarily want their electric needs exposed to the risks of North Africa. Morocco may be a shining star of North Africa or even all of Africa, but even as a region North Africa has a lot more risks, especially when you're talking large fields of vulnerable panels.
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http://www.meteocentrale.ch/en... [meteocentrale.ch]
Morocco has far more land area than the desert in Spain.
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> including transportation as well as goods like food, clothing and other consumer goods
It's not immediately obvious why you've chosen to include these items in the calculation, or how any details on how things like "food, clothing and other consumer goods" was converted into a kWh equivalent. (Hint: Maybe a link to a source would help)
In any case, it still isn't obvious how these things would necessarily need to be replaced with solar, and only solar.
=Smidge=
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In the US, to go fully solar+Storage, you're talking about something between 24 and 72 TRILLION dollars.
For comparison, the US' GDP is currently about 19 trillion.
And one would have to do this every 20-40 years, plus maintenance for panels and battery storage units that randomly break in the interim.
Plus, are we ready for the MEGATONS of solar trash this will produce at end-of-life?
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Power plants don't last forever, either. A nuclear plant's design life is 30 to 40 years; a coal plant lasts, on average, 54 years; a gas turbine is designed to last only 20 years.
Mind you, I don't think for one minute that solar can handle our nighttime power needs, because battery storage is completely impractical, and there just isn't any prayer of getting cryogenic s
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Wrong, a nuclear plant's usual design lifetime is 60 years plus license extensions.
And I'm not saying we SHOULDN'T use solar as part of a greater plan to retrofit our grids off coal, oil and gas.
We SHOULD.
I am just SUPREMELY skeptical about any plan talking about 100% renewables.
The thing is, most panel recycling is simply knocking the metal parts off, then dumping the panel in a landfill.
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Yeah, and if you set aside another sixth (or more likely: hundredth) of Arizona for one huge landfill you could completely stop bothering about recycling. And yet, somehow the ecofreaks have never suggested that.
Re: Selenium fills the gaps (Score:2)
...and it gets dark at night.
In some places but that's racist.
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If you want to replace all power production deemed harmful with PV
But that would be ridiculous. Why would anyone suggest doing that?
Solar PV is just part of the solution. Eventually standard roofing materials will include solar PV. But wind is the far bigger resource. Even the most pessimistic estimates say the UK has 5x as much wind energy in its territorial waters as it needs for itself, with more realistic estimates up at the 20-30x range.
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But wind is the far bigger resource.
Not really. Globally, solar energy flux is vastly higher than its inefficient conversion into wind [beyondthis...nomaly.org] - by about two orders of magnitude.
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Re: Selenium fills the gaps (Score:2)
The Earth has an albedo (a reflection rate) of about 0.3, which means that it reflects about 30% directly back into space.
Is that before or after all that zig-zaggy geoengineering they began doing about fifteen years ago??
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Uhm No.
I think you'll find you need to calculate cloud cover.
Western Europe isn't too bad. But Eastern Europe is atrocious. Out of any given sunlit hour, you're talking less than 10%.
A mere doubling of surface area doesn't overcome that.
Even in very sunny areas, the general practice is to triple generation capacity to offset low-generation days.
So in places like Germany and Poland, you're likely to need outrageously unaffordable amounts of excess capacity to counter this.
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And I'm saying that your calculation is still too optimistic.
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Or they could stop worrying about the possibility of the EU eventually collapsing, and just build the solar farms in countries that don't have that problem and trunk the power in via superconducting cables. You have a choice: nationalism or environmentalism. You can't have both. :-)
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This has nothing to do with the EU.
And you're trying to ignore the real problem of transmission losses by talking about "superconducting cables".
Show me a 500KV superconducting line that can be implemented so that it retains low line loss throughout operational ENVIRONMENTAL temperature ranges.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/... [nextbigfuture.com]
Because it doesn't make much sense to generate a megawatt of power, piss away 20-25% on line loss, and another 10% on conversion/stepping losses.
Line loss on a 765KV line is about 1.2-
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Realistically you'll need significantly MORE than that to account for low-generation days where there's not a lot of direct sun.
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so you need to cover 20% of Germany to produce all the electric Germany needs.
Not really; including atmospheric conditions, diurnal cycles, etc. should give you an average of around 20 W per 1 m^2 of horizontal surface. Covering 20% of Germany would give you an average of around 1.4 TW and overgenerate German needs by a factor of around 25 (around 12500 TWh instead of the 500 TWh needed).
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If you want to replace all power production deemed harmful with PV, the average European country is probably looking at plastering a third to half its area with cells.
Absolute rubbish. Some back of the envelope calculations show that 2% of the Earth land area covered with PV cells would more than cover our global current and projected usage for a decade or two. Yes that's a hell of a lot of PV cells, orders of magnitude more than we have produced in total so far, but available land area is not the constraint.
Assumtions: Energy demand = 100TW (currently around 10TW but if we are projecting increase in usage and population...). Average solar energy available at the surf
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Last I looked, Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries weren't exactly cheap, close to 3-4x the cost of AGM lead acid.
I pay close attention to marine power applications and you don't see them used that much there, including luxury yachts where the increase in cost is a rounding error in a $4 million dollar boat. It's still all variations on lead-acid, usually AGM.
Maybe marine designers just don't care, with the idea that power demands are so great and fuel relatively cheap that they just expect continuous power s
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Europe is not the ideal place to make projections because it is heavily de-industrialized
Says who? [wikipedia.org] The US is at 20% of industrial share of GDP. The world is at 30% on average. The EU has 25% share of industry on average. Where's your "ideal place", then?
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So instead of using Head & Shoulders shampoo on the next rapidly evolving alien species to invade earth, we just feed them solar panels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Imagine megatons of it in landfills...
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It's actually very easy. You use the solar power to pump up metal tanks at certain stations with high-pressure air. Then, when the train is stopped at those stations, you use those tanks to pressurize the tanks on the train, and you use the pressurized air to move the train [wikipedia.org].