Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aenm.202001189

by rch • 6 years ago

218 223 6 years ago

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Grakel• 6 years ago

There's no shortage of open area to put solar panels. If we put a (nearly) continuous strip in every highway median, that would be a huge step forward, and still take up practically zero useable space. Even 1% of the federally owned land in the sun belt would generate an enormous amount of power.

rch• 6 years ago

This approach would benefit community solar and remote microgrid projects, as well as geographically constrained places like the UK where the study was done.

vmception3• 6 years ago

Just waiting for it to be economical in the nearer term and all of this stuff will magically start appearing. Everyone goes through the motions of thinking about solar solutions to energy, and then they realize how little power they provide and how many they need en masse and then scrap the idea.

Once the math adds up for a quicker ROI, the plans will stop getting shelved and will be presented as novel by different people.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

I think we're already there for regular PV. It's getting to the point where a home system will almost pay for itself in less than 10 years.

hirundo• 6 years ago

"if the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five year" -- Milton Friedman (exaggerating, somewhat)

Better to put them on home roofs, and arrange for them to be owned by the homeowners, designed so that the occupants are (literally) empowered when the grid is mismanaged, as in California.

On highway medians control is more centralized, and they would require more maintenance and cleaning, which would be more disruptive in that location.

singron• 6 years ago

Solar panels on home roofs aren't necessarily configured to power the house without the grid. Also you would additionally need batteries and related hardware to have a usable source of power at any time, so unless your house is set up for off-grid solar, you still need the grid to be managed well.

Retric2• 6 years ago

Rooftop photovoltaic is currently more expensive, less efficient, and surprisingly dangerous to install. Solar thermal designs actually benefit from being on rooftops.

As to dust, economies of scale make a huge difference. It’s rarely worth it, but using a farm truck to spray water across miles of panels is much more efficient than tens of thousands of homeowners doing the same.

danans2• 6 years ago

Better to put them on home roofs, and arrange for them to be owned by the homeowners, designed so that the occupants are (literally) empowered when the grid is mismanaged, as in California.

It turns out that the same California that you criticize now requires solar on newly built homes, just as you recommend, and much to the chagrin of people who feel like the state government is impinging on individuals' rights to build however they please.

pwagland• 6 years ago

if the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five year" -- Milton Friedman (exaggerating, somewhat)

I know that this is meant to be a humorous comment, however, desert sand is not really usable for most things that we want sand for, for example, it is not suitable for concrete, since it is too fine. (https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/could-desert-sand-b...)

This is why, desire being in a desert, Dubai imports its sand! (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160502-even-desert-ci...)

dehrmann6• 6 years ago

It's most efficient to put the panels in a centralized location with high amounts of sunlight on mounts that track the sun. You get significantly higher yield because of the tracking and the location, and maintenance is cheaper because it's centralized.

The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "empowerment" fantasy.

p1mrx• 6 years ago

the occupants are (literally) empowered when the grid is mismanaged, as in California.

The California blackouts started around sunset, when solar dropped off the grid. Building more solar without an appropriate amount of storage just makes the problem worse.

ape4• 6 years ago

Vehicles often crash into things beside a highway.

bialpio• 6 years ago

Planes sometimes fall on people's roofs. Let's not optimize for edge cases here?

evan_2• 6 years ago

That will surely be taken into consideration from the start, and they will be designed in easily replaceable sections. If a car hits a section maybe it will be disabled but the rest of the cells will be fine and a crew will be dispatched to repair or replace the damaged cells.

altcognito• 6 years ago

They would also get dirty at a much faster rate because of all the dirt and soot generated by the vehicles going by.

jameslk3• 6 years ago

The solar panels on roads idea has been tried. Rotting leaves were a big source of its failure.

https://www.businessinsider.com/first-solar-road-france-fail...

ianai2• 6 years ago

Doesn’t matter. Much of the US roads aren’t anywhere near trees - ie the southwest. Huge amount of roads and solar power potential there too. Also, cleaning crews are a thing that have existed in the past and should again.

cominous• 6 years ago

It failed because building an efficient solar panel is already hard enough without thousands of cars running over them. Just build a solar-roof instead.

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

GP said the median, not the roadway itself.

gmueckl• 6 years ago

One thing that I don't get about this and related stories: if the road surface is damaged as badly as they say, then why are there no pictures of the damage (the one picture showing damaged modules is described as not taken from modules instLled on the road)? Also, I googled several other stories and none of them has hard facts on why it failed, essentially speculating about different reasons.

Something about this story is not quite right, at least the way it was reported in English language media.

eloff• 6 years ago

Yeah, land is not at a shortage. The best land for solar is also worthless for other things, so it tends to be dirt cheap. There's enough unused space in the Southeast US to power the entire world off of solar. Obviously that wouldn't work for other reasons, but underscores nicely how land isn't the issue at all.

dehrmann6• 6 years ago

If we put a (nearly) continuous strip in every highway median

Is there a shortage of land for solar?

newyankee3• 6 years ago

I was wondering if they can be put up on poles holding train's electric tractive wires and then fed directly to the same wire. The issue i see is dc to ac conversion and lot of variability management.

amelius• 6 years ago

Maintenance in the middle of the road sucks ...

aaron695• 6 years ago

I was just thinking farmers had it to easy harvesting their crops.

If we take the solar panels off the 1% of roof space they are on and move them far away from the place we use the actual power, we could do this.

The attention span of the environmental movement is quite amazing at times.

newyankee3• 6 years ago

I cannot imagine the revolution that solar power will produce if it can fall another 3-5x in the next 10 years. It is already at grid parity.

Although my personal hope is for storage, inverters, controllers and other technologies to get cheaper. Especially longer term storage beyond 4 hours.

toomuchtodo3• 6 years ago

I think it’s unlikely you see any fossil generation in the mix in 10 years except in the most remote of locations (with no solar or wind potential).

Wind and solar are already around 2 cents/kWh utility scale, and batteries are catching up. No fossil or nuclear generation can compete with that.

emit_time• 6 years ago

Source?

I don't disagree, would just like to share this information with friends :)

repsilat• 6 years ago

I'd bet there will be some natural gas generation in the US in non-remote areas in 2030. Maybe not new construction, but gas is cheap, responsive, and already in place. I don't think it'll be completely replaced by batteries and added renewable capacity that quickly, though I'd love to be proven wrong.

manfredo4• 6 years ago

Batteries are catching up.

Are they? The US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily. It's estimated that it needs 3 weeks if storage to get to 100% carbon free [1]. By comparison global battery production in 2019 was 300GWh [2]. Even if you factor in the fact that the curve of battery production is rising, it'd take decades to fullfil just the US's storage demands with batteries. There are other storage options like hydroelectricity and pumping air into mineshafts, but those are geographically limited.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

newyankee3• 6 years ago

Which means we need battery storage at LCOE < 3 cents/kwh so a battery that lasts many cycles (> 4000) would really help in lowering costs.

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

When I spin thinking I see:

- information is mostly everywhere

- computing is mostly everywhere, can turn knowledge into instructions

- most machinery is accessible and can be replicated (not saying cpu fab)

- what's missing in that frame is an open faucet of clean energy

xxs2• 6 years ago

Instead of inverters, there should be a push for DC network.

Virtually all SMPS would be able to to work with DC (right now) and they won't even need active power factor correction either. Washing mashines with brushless DC motors, most ovens would be fine too. When I think almost everything that I have home, save for geothermal pump and three-phase appliances would be ok powered by DC(0). DC has its own issues: galvanic corrosion possibly being one, arcs too (no self-extinguish 50/60 times sec) but it has no issues with inductance, hence lower transport costs.

(0)Cheap LEDs with capacitor dropper or regulation by triacs are not compatible.

m4632• 6 years ago

I see DC used in electric cars, general automotive and RVs.

I will say 12v is not very useful, except maybe for LED lighting. It has high losses to travel any distance. To power anything of significance requires higher voltage (or enormous cables).

I do agree that it would be really good to use DC, but I kind of wonder what the reality of efficient and useful DC would be like.

xwdv• 6 years ago

Alternatively, dust build up on the solar panels can prevent production of both.

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

automated panel cleaning is probably solved by now

Communitivity• 6 years ago

Not just crops and power. I know a guy whose startup is using transparent solar panels in Germany on eco-friendly buildings with grass on roofs, to get power and eco-cooling, as well as Oxygen production - at least that is how he explained it. The concept is called green-roofs. Unfortunately I don't remember his startup's name.

A link with details about the concept, minus the use of transparent solar panels: https://buildingradar.com/construction-blog/green-roofs/

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

Are there places to read about this field ? journals, websites, discord anything ?

nitrogen2• 6 years ago

Do they grow enough grass to produce enough oxygen for the building?

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

The oxygen claim doesn't inspire confidence.

Plants don't produce any useful amount of oxygen, and real scientists know that.

atoav• 6 years ago

A thing that they are good at however, is lowering temperatures in cities (compared to e.g. stone surfaces which store the warmth of the sun) – this alone might be a good reason to look into green roofs, given that we just passed the point of no return for Greenland's ice sheet recently.

It takes the same amount of energy to melt 1kg of 0°C ice into 0°C water as it takes to heat 1kg of 0°C water to 80°C.

hutzlibu4• 6 years ago

So what on this earth is producing useful amounts of oxygen then?

lifeisstillgood• 6 years ago

Umm ... You may be confusing net production with actual production (ie plants produce pretty much all the O2 but they then reabsorb it)

I suspect it is also worth differentiating between production as has been going on for millions of years and industrial production - there is really no way to collect or harvest the oxygen made by plants - but that is kinda implied by the GP statement (that they wanted to cool the roof make electricity and Oxygen production (the implication being something useful to a business based on that roof)

So I can see your point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle

felipemnoa• 6 years ago

>Plants don't produce any useful amount of oxygen, and real scientists know that.

Could you please add some context to this statement. It is hard to believe that the oxygen produced by plants is so negligible as to be useless. Why?

titzer• 6 years ago

lmgfy

https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-oxygen-does-one-tree-prod...

A fully mature tree produces anywhere from 2 to 10 persons-worth of oxygen.

I too am skeptical about the amount of oxygen that can be usefully produced by rooftop plants. Yet I still think it is a good idea.

recuter3• 6 years ago

"Dirt grass and a goat get you a LEED point - does the dirt grass and a goat make it work better? No! But you do feel better about yourself! Dirt is not insulation it's just freaking dirt"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lstiburek (https://youtu.be/iHBYvqr2_io?t=2224)

Gotta love greenwashing. A real forward thinker would also start a second startup simultaneously to undo the damage green roofs will cause down the line to a building. :)

Edit: In case somebody misses the point the video from which the quote is sourced is well worth watching if you are curios about building science.

tl;dw - What is efficient and good for the environment is counterintuitive. Green roofs often cause more harm than good because reasons.

hutzlibu4• 6 years ago

I don't really like having to watch some youtube video, to get the counterpoint, all presented in a non friendly way.

So do you have some facts, you want to share, why green roofs, a method for example used in scandinavia for a long time, is bad, if done right?

Because you quote ... is not a smart one. Because dirt is definitley insulation. And soild is more than dirt btw.

ragebol2• 6 years ago

I'm also considering making a green roof. Apparently, since the plants (sedum/stonecrops and mosses) help cool the roof, the solar panels on top of it are a bit cooler too increasing their efficiency.

It also helps retain some water so it does not go to the sewer directly after it rains of the roof and keeps the sewer from getting overloaded.

Another claimed benefit it is that a green roof helps reduce fine particulates in the air. And biodiversity etc etc.

Its kinda expensive to do right though, so maybe some time.

prawn• 6 years ago

Depending on the style of house, it also makes better use of space if you're otherwise trying to balance space for gardening or for your children to play, etc. I would love to be able to grow my vegetables on the roof and free up the ground level of a basketball ring or more lawn for the kids.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

So this technique reduces the sunlight the plants receive by about 57% but only reduces biomass growth by about 30%. It's very interesting. I imagine you could enclose the sides with glass or plastic and make a greenhouse from it. That makes me wonder if the reduction in growth wouldn't be offset by the ability to extend the growing season.

conscion• 6 years ago

I imagine you could enclose the sides with glass or plastic and make a greenhouse from it

FTA - that's why they tested on basil and spinach. Both crops are commonly grown in greenhouses

bserge• 6 years ago

make a greenhouse from it

That would be literally Earth-saving in some places. I know people who heat their greenhouses with wood! Wood, from forests, which are quickly dwindling, and yet it's cheaper than natural gas, so people use this country's forests to keep warm during winter just because it's cheaper.

From my point of view, that's absolutely insane and this country deserves what it gets.

Which is decreased rainfall, increased summer temperatures, landslides, floods (ironically) and crop damage so bad it puts farmers out of business (they're protesting right now).

Then they wonder "why, God, why?" like a bunch of headless chickens. We deserve everything we get. Sorry, I had to get this off my chest.

khawkins• 6 years ago

Only people who spend most of their life in densely crowded cities could think that the planet has so little space that you'd need to grow crops underneath solar panels for efficiency's sake.

Causality1• 6 years ago

Indeed. This reminds me of the "let's drive on top of our panels" stupidity. I suppose it could have practical applications in space colonization.

epistasis2• 6 years ago

A lot of farmers are leasing their land to solar developers because it provides guaranteed, stable payments.

Though "we" as a whole are not limited by land, individual economic actors are limited by how much land they own.

Additionally, interconnection to the grid and node congestion are becoming larger percentages of the cost of solar, since they are roughly constant as the cost of solar plummets. Farms are somewhat ideal for medium size solar installations because they often have significant existing grid connections that are underutilized.

Now that we have economical solar tech, the actual implementation of solar installs will be highly dependent on regulations, economic motivations of individual economic agents, the knowledge and intelligence of thistle agents, and combinations with existing infrastructure. (For example, we are seeing batteries being installed in old fossil fuel plants, so that we can reuse those super expensive grid connections.)

epistasis2• 6 years ago

It's not "need" as much as increasing efficiency and profit. There are at least a few studies now that have shown that multipurpose use for both agriculture and solar will provide greater output than doing only one; for example you may lose 30% of maximum potential solar production and 40% of agricultural output, but it's still not >50% loss for either. These studies were not performed with this type of semi-transparent as in this article, so perhaps the boost could be larger, if the additional cost of the panels is not too high.

everybodyknows2• 6 years ago

From the abstract:

up to +2.5% for basil and +35% for spinach

There's a reason for this: Spinach cannot tolerate mid-summer heat, and doesn't need full sunlight. Was told this by local organic farmers here in coastal SoCal -- and because my own backyard plantings turned yellow and died.

senko• 6 years ago

1. Agriculture is one of the main causes of deforestation.

2. Many plants are already grown in greenhouses.

dehrmann6• 6 years ago

I do worry somewhat about devastating desert ecosystems by paving over them with PV panels, but we're so far from that being a problem right now.

samatman5• 6 years ago

Depends on the desert ecosystem.

Most desert ecosystems have a wretched excess of sunlight, and lack moisture.

Solar panels treat both of these: they capture a lot (but by no means all) of the sunlight, and serve as a nice, concentrated condensing surface for dews.

You can see this at a panel farm in dry areas: there's often a nice row of green in front of each panel, precisely where the condensing dew drips off them onto the ground below.

dTal• 6 years ago

And only someone blind to the ecological damage that agriculture does would regard all that land as free to use by humans, without consequences.

Here [0] is a map of the world's remaining wilderness. Notice how it's nearly all desert, with the exception of the Amazon rainforest. And hey, guess what's happening to that?

We are short of space. And time.

[0] https://images.theconversation.com/files/256144/original/fil...

samatman5• 6 years ago

Granted that the desert is effectively ideal for solar panels, and less useful for agriculture.

An interesting application of this technology would be building solar arrays along the edge of advancing deserts, with shade-tolerant plants with the sort of root systems which have been shown to halt and reverse desertification.

It's easier to do good things (such as halting the inexorable spread of the Sahara) if the operation is revenue-positive. Even though this would be more labor and less energy than just putting up a panel farm and calling it a day, it's more of a return on investment than the big old zero you'd get from just planting to try and fix dunes.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Financialized, high output agriculture drives that, not farming in general.

hutzlibu4• 6 years ago

Deserts are a perfect place for greenhouses as well as solar panels. Just not both of them combined. That concept might make sense in very densly populated areas, where people want to use the most out of their garden greenhouse. But on industrial scale, I am very sceptical, the efficency should be a lot higher to justify the building costs and increased complexity.

andromeduck• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is a thing.

kube-system6• 6 years ago

“wilderness” is defined as places generally untouched by people at all, not land that is unused. The vast majority of the unmarked areas of that map are still unused.

invalidusernam3• 6 years ago

What's the definition of wilderness used on this map? The only wilderness area on the map that I've been to is the Okavango delta (which is amazing btw), but in terms of remoteness (lack of people/infrastructure) it's not that different from many of the surrounding areas

fsflover• 6 years ago

Except most of the "agriculture" damage occurs due to meat production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

"In the contiguous United States, 127.4 million acres of crops are grown for animal consumption, compared to the 77.3 million acres of crops grown for human consumption.[23]"

Dahoon• 6 years ago

Really? Please look at a map of europe and see how much wilderness you can find. Not a forest but actual real wild nature without humans or buildings. Almost anything you find is only there because it is useless for farming. I live outside cities but I have never in my life seen any wilderness outside television and pictures.

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

If you have a plot of land, why not make a few extra bucks?

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

You need logistics (electricity, roads, water). It costs a lot. It's more efficient to utilize 3D rather than utilizing only 2D.

When we're talking about humans, I'd agree that living in a crowded city is a terrible thing (though some people might like it). But when we're talking about industrial objects, efficiency is important.

kube-system6• 6 years ago

If the space is available, it is nearly always cheaper and more efficient to build horizontally.

m4632• 6 years ago

Exactly. Elon musk said something about the amount of solar required to power the entire country, and it was a very very small fraction of the land area. There is plenty of room for both plants and solar - separately.

brianhorakh• 6 years ago

Transportation of food is an issue, it also damages or controls food quality. Certain types of food (usually the tastiest varietals) don't transport well. Climate change may disrupt large portions of growing zones / home gardens in the next 5-50 years. Food in stores is grown & treated for how it will look on a shelf in a grocery store.. Not for nutritional value or taste.

Qub3d• 6 years ago

Yep. Same problem that plagued "Solar FREAKIN' [sic] roadways" and is mentioned in the xkcd flowchart "Should I put Solar Panels on it?": https://xkcd.com/1924/

We have flat unused ground. Lets focus on getting solar there and put our whiz-bang technical chops to work solving the more difficult problem of robust distribution and storage of power.

gdubs2• 6 years ago

Our area of Oregon recently banned new solar farms on the grounds that it detracts from the beauty of the landscape – a wine region with lots of tourism. Ironically, that very beauty is threatened by the changing climate, which clean energy could help mitigate.

foolfoolz• 6 years ago

eh i don’t see anything wrong with this. some areas are beautiful and should remain that way. we have a ton of space in oregon and the us. tons of space that no one is ever going to care about. i think it’s ok for people to protect places that have interest and economic benefits

gdubs2• 6 years ago

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with trying to protect the character of the region. In fact, the beauty is something that — hopefully — makes visitors appreciate the environment.

But when you look at what’s already allowed in farm-use zones, there’s plenty of eye-sore potential. So, my issue is with painting with too wide a brush (and unfairly singling out a use that’s arguably important to preserving the environment over the longer term). They should have the ability to look case-by-case.

If someone has an area on their property that’s shielded from public view, why not let them use it for a solar array? Studies have shown that, properly configured, solar arrays can actually improve prairie soils. And like the large array in Hawaii, grazers like sheep can be incorporated into the design.

Just seems bonkers to me to outright ban the solar arrays.

quotemstr4• 6 years ago

Let's be real for a second. Climate change isn't going to destroy Oregon's wine-growing regions within our lifetimes. A solar farm will change it within months. You can support or oppose solar farm bans according to your liking, but you should do so on the basis of facts. The two forces aren't even close to equal in magnitude and timing.

orev• 6 years ago

The “not within my lifetime so who cares” trope has been around for decades, and guess what? Climate change is happening faster than anyone imagined, mostly because scientists can only present findings on things they are certain about, which makes the predictions conservative. Most people are already seeing the impact of climate change, and if it’s not visible to you personally, it has never been easier to seek out information on those that are. If you really can’t see past your own lifetime and feel that you should be able to take whatever you want from the planet simply because you don’t need to deal with the repercussions, then you are not part of human society and are free to leave the planet at any time.

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

It's already partially responsible [1] for negatively impacting Northern California's wine growing and this year could be worse.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/climate-c...

atomi• 6 years ago

isn't going to destroy Oregon's wine-growing regions within our lifetimes

Shameless.

evan_2• 6 years ago

I suppose I must be different than you, in that I love my children

imtringued4• 6 years ago

Is that supposed a joke? Solar panels are just blue squares. Other than aesthetics they do practically nothing to hurt Oregon.

hellotomyrars2• 6 years ago

Solar is going to ruin Oregon's Wine-growing region in months? Because people don't like to look at them?

Absurd.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

Could we design one to mostly get energy from green light which plants reject anyway?

dehrmann6• 6 years ago

This was my first thought, but PV panels that capture 25% (I'm guessing) the energy of standard panels are only viable if the cost of land is the limiting factor.

The other complicating factor is that large-scale farming requires a decent amount of horizontal and vertical clearance, so the structure for the panels would be substantial, especially if you want to track the sun.

everybodyknows2• 6 years ago

From the abstract:

selective utilization of different light wavelengths

hobofan• 6 years ago

Yes, it says it in the abstract, but isn't really given special attention to in the article itself.

Looking at the graphic it looks like a fairly normal absorption spectrum for a solar panel without it being specifically tailored to this use-case. It seems like there might still be something won by specifically tailoring it to be complementary to the plant absorption spectrum. On the other hand it might also not be economically viable due to lack of scale and varying requirements for wavelengths between plant species and stages of plant development, which makes some optimizations moot.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

This is very interesting!

A few related questions come to mind:

1) What happens when two or more semi-transparent solar panels are stacked one behind the other? Is output power then comparable to the highest efficiency solar panel, do you get more, do you get less, and if so, how much less?

2) Polarization of light and solar panels -- what happens if light is polarized by a filter before going to a solar panel? And then, what happens (in terms of overall energy production) when that polarization filter is turned to an angle? And then the same question, applied to both regular solar panels, and these semi-transparent solar panels.

3) While I'm on the topic, has any researcher out there found a way to get even so much as a single millivolt/milliwatt (microvolt/microwatt?) from solar power coupled with a fully transparent surface, like let's say, glass, or some other crystal? I seem to recall some researcher somewhere that showed that very small charge regions occur at boundaries when sunlight hits plain transparent water -- but I do not recall the details...

csours• 6 years ago

I'm imagining a green-greenhouse which covers all of it's energy usage with these panels.

Edit: heck, what about auto-glass?

quotemstr4• 6 years ago

Besides: nuclear power plants take up very little space. I really can't seriously people pushing solar, wind, and so on while they eschew nuclear power (and increasingly hydropower too).

Fake environmentalists: "We have an existential crisis! We must change our energy strategy to save humanity!"

Engineers: "That's quite a problem. Here's a way to solve it. It's called fission. Here are some power plant designs."

Fake environmentalists: "Nooo! Not that plan! This existential problem can be solved using only those technologies that agree with my aesthetics!"

It gets old after a while. If carbon-induced anthropogenic climate is a problem --- and I think it is --- then we shouldn't disparage good solutions on weak grounds in favor of solutions with serious problems. We don't need to devote swaths of land to solar and wind if we just build nice compact nuclear power stations.

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

only those technologies that agree with my aesthetics!"

This is an exceptionally bad straw-man [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate

brokencode• 6 years ago

So you think caring about nuclear waste along with CO2 emissions makes someone a fake environmentalist? Nuclear waste is highly toxic and difficult to store and transport safely.

Also, have you ever heard of Chernobyl or Fukushima? Nuclear reactors are great in certain ways, but can be catastrophically bad too.

Hydro also can cause a significant environmental impact, flooding natural habitat and interrupting water routes for different animals.

Solar and wind aren’t perfect either, but the idea is to try to chose a power source that is as clean as possible.

codefreakxff• 6 years ago

The tone of your post (being simultaneously dismissive and insulting to those who have a different view than you) is very trollish. The problem many people have with nuclear power are things like accidents making areas uninhabitable, radiation making people sick, disposal of waste rods is difficult, some materials can be used to make weapons, and the cost to make a safe plant are staggering and leading to cancellation of projects.

Renewable sources don’t have these downsides. Are they ugly? Not any uglier than a concrete dome and cooling systems of a nuclear power plant. You can bet wine country does not want a nuclear plant in their valley either. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to zone land usage appropriately.

pas• 6 years ago

Renewables have externalities too. Just because it's harder to mass hyterise them, they still exist. Eg the cost of mining for battery parts, parts that are needed to manufacture hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, millions of PV panels, inverters, etc.

That said, of course it's perfectly reasonable to try to preserve some areas, and to put power generation somewhere out of sight.

skriticos2• 6 years ago

Agree.

Compared to renewables - nuclear is a big risk (financial and operational). Also nuclear needs a lot of water, which is getting to be a serious problem. Compared to coal/gas/biomass they look great though in our current terraforming predicament.

There is no way we could build enough of them in the near term to matter, so that makes this discussion moot anyway. There is simply not enough expertise and production capacity left. Very few nuclear plants have been completed recently and the institutional knowlege is fading. It takes a lot of time and effort to reinvigorate that, especially since the nuclear industry is so extremely conservative.

Also the conversation is not being done on technical merits - but political inertia, an unwillingness to change and special interests by established energy companies (coal, gas).

As you say, renewables are still winning (slowly) because of the low risk profile and generally being price competitive.

Not that it matters much, we are mostly over the point of no return. It's just a matter of time before this ball is getting very unpleasant, sadly. We are just playing with the dial on how quickly that happens.

quotemstr4• 6 years ago

New nuclear power plant designs [1] have many intrinsic safety features that largely obviate the old safety concerns that you mention. Anti-nuclear advocates conspicuously ignore these new designs, instead opposing a vision of the nuclear power system that hasn't been current since the 1960s. Argumentum ad Chernobylum just convinces me that the animus against nuclear power comes from aesthetic considerations and not a sober optimization of human welfare against ecological damage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

LunaSea• 6 years ago

Renewables definitely have those downsides. Especially if you look at the recycling procedures of solar panels and led batteries.

cf: Other link on the front page of HN: https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

imtringued4• 6 years ago

Do you know what? Private industry doesn't care about nuclear. The only way to build nuclear is through government projects which is why there is immense pressure by nuclear companies to publicly dismiss everything that can support itself. Companies set up their own coal plants, natural gas plants, solar farms, wind farms and so on but what they don't do is build their own nuclear plants. Come up with better power plant designs and maybe then private industry will be interested.

sroussey2• 6 years ago

There are better power plant designs, but regulations are based on designs from 50+ years ago, and thus no one has built a new safer design since.

missedthecue• 6 years ago

There aren't 6 billion permits, licenses, and regulations to comply with when setting up a solar farm. On top of this, you don't assume much liability when installing a solar panel. You do when creating a nuclear reaction. Pouring the concrete and building the core of a nuclear plant is not inherently more expensive than plenty of other projects that private industry funds.

The cost overruns in nuclear come from necessary but burdensome regulatory requirements.

jodrellblank2• 6 years ago

Wind turbines can be offshore. You can buy a wind turbine "off the shelf" and have people without nuclear training plonk it down wherever you want it, approximately as soon as you can stump up the money and get planning approval.

The USA has been adding wind turbines at the rate of ~four a day every day for the last fourty years, for a total of some ~60,000. In that same time the USA has started 4 nuclear power plants[1], all in 2013, all unfinished/in progress. The UK has ~11,000 wind turbines. We have 1 nuclear plant started construction in the last 30 years (Hinkley C) and it is two years in, and over budget. UK has five more proposed nuclear plants, and of those two are shelved and one cancelled[3].

It's not proven that the UK or USA still has the ability to build working nuclear reactors, or the ability to organise and approve and fund them - look at this link [2] about the last few years of the UK government changing, making, and cancelling approval and funding plans. Or that the UK will be able to source and transport nuclear fuels and wastes after Brexit.

Even putting all that aside, and assuming the world can source enough nuclear fuels for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and assuming we can overcome concerns about terrorism, and about getting a large increase in skilled people to build and maintain them, we can build and install wind turbines today, but if we start building one new nuclear plant a week it will be approximately a Trillion dollars (Hinkley point C in the UK is expected to be £23Bn+, the UK would need ~50 to go entirely nuclear for several Trillion pounds, the USA would need many more) and a decade or two to get a large amount of power generation from them. In two decades, wind and solar could blanket the country if we wanted, solar price drops, lithium ion battery price drops and other storage systems could make significant progress for a fraction of that money.

I'm not against nuclear in principle, but the first UK production reactor in 1966 was £30 million which is about £0.5 Billion in today's money. In 2008 the government was estimating £2.5 billion per plant, the chairman of E.ON said it could be £5 billion per plant. By 2012 estimates were up to £7 billion. Hinkley Point C had an actual estimated construction cost of £20 billion. In 2013 Centrica withdrew citing higher than expected costs. By 2015 the UK government agreed to pay double-rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C as a subsidy of about £6 billion on top of the build costs. By 2016 the UK National Audit Office said that subsidy could end up being more like £30 billion all-in. In 2017 they revised that to £50 billion. In 2016 the construction cost exceeded the entire market cap. of EDF the French company supposed to be building it. By 2020 it's two years into construction and construction costs are up another £3 billion to ~£23bn and we're Brexiting. It's been described as the most expensive power station in the world. The UK government has banned the funding model used from being used on future power plants.

Realistically, are we going to be 5 years down the line from here, with costs increasing so much the project gets shelved unfinished, or EDF collapsing and unable to finish it? There has to be a non-zero chance of that happening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...

[3]

tehjoker2• 6 years ago

There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit (iirc 30 years). It can at best be used as a transition source or a supplemental source.

quotemstr4• 6 years ago

There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to power the world for more than a little bit

This claim is simply false. The argument in favor of this view involves a very narrow interpretation of proven reserves that excludes discovery. The argument you're making is the same as peak-oil-ism, and we all know how that turned out.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

dang• 6 years ago

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253613.

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

There is a LOT of low-hanging fruit when it comes to where to install plain old regular solar.

We could probably spend the next 50-100 years installing as many (regular) solar panels as possible and still have plenty of places left to put more of them.

Obviously it's not bad to develop these technologies, but I think they'll only be useful in niche applications.

richardrk• 6 years ago

"Maximizing the generation of electricity is a desirable goal, but might be at the expense of biomass production. For example, for lettuce, the total biomass yield under agrivoltaic installation in Montpellier (France) was 15–30% less than the control conditions (i.e., full‐sun conditions).[28, 29] When growth of tomato was tested in Japan, the yield in an agrivoltaic regime was about 10% lower than for conventional agriculture."

dghughes• 6 years ago

My mother ayed tomatoes in the spring when it was still cool. She covered them with clear plastic bags as she always has. But she needed one more bag so she used a blue recycling bag on one of the plants. Blue tinged really it's almost clear.

I pointed out to her one of the plants had yellow leaves. It was the plant with the blue bag.

Later in the summer the blue bag plant produced fruit just like the other plants. But the bottom of each tomato was disfigured and looked rotten but it was dry to the touch. It's blossom rot due to low calcium. I have to wonder if it was the blue bag or lack of/too much water. All the plants got the same nutrients only this one had the blue bag. It got red light and green light which plants don't need but no blue light.

Plants are seemingly very sensitive to sunlight quality. I'm sure the solar panels are clear but even a slight colour blockage may be harmful.

It was an interesting result.

jws• 6 years ago

The ratio of red and blue light controls various functions of a plant. In the context of aquarium plants, more red light makes them get tall and leggy, more blue light makes them be compact and bushy.

https://gpnmag.com/article/effects-of-blue-light-on-plants/ talks a bit about it in the context of greenhouses and tomatoes, the picture in the middle shows 6 plants grown with wildly different red/blue ratios.

If the balance of the light coming through your solar panel was problematic, you could always filter out some of the overabundant light.

ballenf• 6 years ago

Is that how they know how close to the surface of the water they are?

carvink2• 6 years ago

That slight colour blockage, or the tint those solar panels have is helpful.

There are two reasons. One, plants grow better under red light. Red light has the highest efficiency for photosynthesis in plants, that why LED grow lights are tuned for certain wavelengths. Plants use blue light to know what direction to grow.

And for a certain category of tints or dyes that are fluorescent, additional red light.

Luminescent solar collectors have an embedded dye with molecules that fluoresce, that give off even more red light.

Example: http://www.soliculture.com/lumo-technology/

UnpossibleJim• 6 years ago

Is that why indoor LED growing lights have that purple-ish tint to them? I never knew that. I knew about the red, but never the blue. You're awesome. Thanks so much.

dawnerd• 6 years ago

All of my plants this year have gotten blossom rot, pretty much too late to fix too. No tomatoes for me this year.

asquabventured• 6 years ago

Blossom end rot is caused by calcium deficiency. Easiest solution for this is to just crush up egg shells and put them in and on top of the soil. I save my eggshells in a jar in the fridge for a few months prior to planting. It may be too late for this year but should work wonders for you in the future.

chris_engel• 6 years ago

A blue plastic bag filters most of the spectrum EXCEPT the blue part. Not the other way around. Simple proof: look inside, the light is blue.

I guess the biggest problem for the plant here is that especially the infrared part of the sunlight is very important. Yellow leaves usually mean not enough light. Especially tomatoes need lots of sunlight.

i-am-curious• 6 years ago

Nope. If the bag looks blue that means it's scattering away blue light while letting the rest through. So it's filtering (out) the blue. OP is right.

tiku• 6 years ago

I always wondered why you could not just place the panels a bit higher. So that the sun can pass on certain times etc.

kube-system6• 6 years ago

Yeah, people are treating this solar panel like a hammer and finding any use-case that looks like a nail.

Instead of a entire roof of panels that pass 50% of the light, it’s is more simple to make a roof of half covered in panels that pass 0% of light... like a pergola.

jugg1es• 6 years ago

This is fascinating but you have to wonder how it would work with current harvesting techniques. New harvesting machines would have to be invented to work around the support infrastructure for the panels if they were to be deployed at scale.

Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power

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