We're going to need a lot of solar panels

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/

by lionheart • 4 years ago

823 774 4 years ago

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

woah• 4 years ago

Is this better or worse than the one where they are cooking corn husks to make oil to squirt into the ground?

This is better. Terraform believes they can make methane from the air for cheaper than it can be extracted from the ground, leading to a preference for "carbon neutral" fuels. Part of their thesis though is the requirement for solar to keep getting cheaper and cheaper (as it has).

Excess manufactured methane could also be injected underground, presumably.

changoplatanero• 4 years ago

What's a more efficient way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen: using electricity from a solar panel or using photosynthesis in a plant?

bullfightonmars• 4 years ago

These are orthogonal concepts this is an attempt to create a carbon neutral hydrocarbon for energy use, the other is an attempt at carbon negative sequestration.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are.

For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.

I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.

The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.

https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...

l1n• 4 years ago

Because their value prop is to generate synthetic fuel instead.

goethes_kind3• 4 years ago

You need synthetic fuel anyway to act as energy storage/buffer.

jonatron• 4 years ago

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ not Libya, but Morocco.

toomuchtodo3• 4 years ago

HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough renewables generation, considering existing curtailment), battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build, Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin.

Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.

https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...

There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.
Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...

walrus0125• 4 years ago

If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time (for building heating purposes).

Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.

oceanplexian• 4 years ago

On one hand it’s an interesting engineering challenge, but I am always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an ecosystem with glass is “good for the environment”. It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

I'm not saying pave over the mojave desert with PV, exactly, rather that a dry salt pan or ecosystem that has an absolute minimum of flora and fauna would be preferable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin

creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has ecological costs

in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the percentage of electricity right now that is generated using gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.

goethes_kind3• 4 years ago

Matter of interpretation. Is humanity at all good for the environment? Some would say no. Solar is clean and deserts are mostly, well, deserts. And climate change seems much worse than having a tiny bit of our deserts being used for PV farms.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

You just space them out a bit and life will thrive all around them. A lot of species will appreciate the shade.

jjk1662• 4 years ago

Hundreds of square km is not a lot, and the ecosystems where these systems would be installed are typically not rich havens of life. The US's power consumption would require about 6000-9000 sq km of solar panels (assuming ~15% efficiency) For comparison in the US there are about 13000-33000 sq km of parking lots, 93000 sq km of alfalfa cultivation, 69000 sq km of fallow agricultural land, and the mojave desert is about 124000 sq km. Yeah with gross mismanagement you might jeopardize the survival of some rare lizard or something, but it's a very far cry from a silicon wasteland.

rektide• 4 years ago

It'a really weird but there's a surprisingly growing base of farming amid a solar farm, where apparently many plants just cant stand the pure sun & benefit from some periodic shade during the day. I dont know how much I believe it but combined agriculture/solar use seems perhaps legit to be a thing.

Also, solar panels dont seem that difficult to recycle. There's already a decent & growing reclaimation market. Giant slabs of polysilicon, with perhaps some glass & metal casing, plus some bus-bars. Strip & toss into a chewer.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

We’ve already desertified tens of thousands of square km of land into parking lots / heat sinks. We could start by shading those abominations with solar panels.

megablast• 4 years ago

Wait until you hear about roads.

stefan_2• 4 years ago

Wait until you hear about how we invented synthetic fertilizer and added 5 billion humans in as many as 100 years. Won't somebody think of the ecosystem!

tuatoru5• 4 years ago

It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.

No, it doesn't. They will be far too busy handling coal ash dumps from coal-fired power stations, and remediating landscapes laid waste by mountain-top removal coal mining.

This will be orders of magnitude smaller as a problem. They will be grateful we finally stopped using coal.

jonnycomputer4• 4 years ago

34,000 square kilometers [1] have already been disturbed for surface coal mining.

Two points about that:

- existing energy sources already do a huge amount of damage to land (and in places like West Virginia, particularly environmentally sensitive land)

- that's land that can already be converted to solar without significant harm being done (the harm has already been done)

[1] https://www.gem.wiki/The_footprint_of_coal

bequanna• 4 years ago

The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable

Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation?

Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline supplies.

if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia.

not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.

conradev• 4 years ago

if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.

One such project being built currently: https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu...

More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of batteries

metalliqaz• 4 years ago

But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported using our existing infrastructure...

whimsicalism2• 4 years ago

This is Hacker News, not "Hackers who read the article News"

thejarren• 4 years ago

Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore is running power wires to gather solar from Australia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

bigcat12345678• 4 years ago

"""

The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023

"""

Being developed

incompatible• 4 years ago

Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.

ben_w5• 4 years ago

A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor).

Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand).

Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

I don't know of any long distance HV AC or DC transmission lines that use copper. It's all aluminum already.

adaml_623• 4 years ago

The good news is that humanity has saved up a few trillion for emergencies. The bad news is that it's been saved up and hidden in tax havens. Pity

lotharcable• 4 years ago

Money != Wealth

You can go ahead and force every billionaire to sell off everything they own and hand it to the government and all you end up with is a one time boost to government tax receipts.

That's it. One time boost. Next year those billionaires will be gone. There won't be new ones.

And it won't create any more food. It won't solve shortages. It won't create more solar panels. It won't create 1 mile of copper lines.

Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?

zbrozek7• 4 years ago

While your house wiring is typically copper, transmission and distribution wiring isn't. That's very-often aluminum. And as you point out, we make a huge amount of the stuff.

eternityforest3• 4 years ago

I doubt copper would be used in that kind of thing. It's worse, but not that much worse.

Energy storage might not be an issue in a decade or so. There's no law of physics saying they can't make batteries without conflict metals. Eventually someone's going to invent a battery made of some cheap hydrocarbon you make by the tanker car, or that compressed Co2 turbine system will turn out to be the real deal, or they'll figure out magnesium air, etc.

elihu4• 4 years ago

I'm curious if anyone knows the cost/benefit analysis of HVDC over aluminum cables versus using high-temperature superconductors like ReBCO tape. Maybe supply of yttrium is a bottleneck preventing large-scale use of ReBCO?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide

Aeolun5• 4 years ago

We don’t need to shift all necessary electricity from one end of the earth to the other right? Just the shortfall that a large number of batteries cannot deal with overnight.

nine_k• 4 years ago

Superconducting power transmission was first implemented back in 2014 [1]. Some progress has been made since then [2].

I bet we'll eventually see more of that, with superconducting materials steadily becoming more pliable and affordable, and liquid nitrogen being pretty cheap. Maybe we'll see hundreds of miles of such lines. It looks to me more realistic than land in Western Europe becoming cheap enough to install a gigawatt of solar panels here and there.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-...

[2] https://energycentral.com/news/shanghai-opens-world-leading-...

Emma_Goldman• 4 years ago

A lovely idea, but it will not happen anytime soon because states consider energy independence to be of existential geopolitical importance.

rocqua8• 4 years ago

Did you take into account that transmission cables are usually hollow? Due to the skin effect, most current runs through the edge of a cable, so by hollowing out the cable you can remove a part that doesn't carry much current.

phkahler• 4 years ago

> I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.

Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert.

I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.

jp57• 4 years ago

But it seems they need places with ample sunshine and water to electrolyze. That rules out the American west, the Sahara, etc. If they can use seawater, then arid coastal areas could work.

worik• 4 years ago

and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are

The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

My point was that maybe we should transport the electricity to where it needs to be used over high voltage long distance lines, rather than running an artificial hydrocarbon fuel generation process, storing it in tanks or pipelines, and then sending it to where it needs to be used, and feeding it into combustion engines.

Pakdef• 4 years ago

Are you saying that CA isn't very sunny?

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

Retric7• 4 years ago

The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping.

As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.

A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.

oneoff786• 4 years ago

Wow shoutout to insolation being an amazing word

influxmoment• 4 years ago

This kind of energy infrastructure is only build in China at the moment. High voltage DC, solar& battery manufacturing, solar installation, new nuclear plants

kurthr• 4 years ago

At current prices, it's already worth fully solar individually... just expensive up front. Batteries and transmission are so expensive it's worth just installing MOAR solar. Connecting to the grid would be $1k/year so (depending on rate of return) it takes ~20years to pay off, which is right around the warrantee period.

Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up.

I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.

kragen16• 4 years ago

The article we're commenting on is about a moderately efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are: you manufacture methane in the sunny place and then ship it to where the load is, either through a pipeline, through a liquefaction terminal, or after an additional process step such as hydroxylating it into methanol.

This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage.

In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.

thatcat• 4 years ago

Piping ch4 would lead to release from all the inevitable pipe line leaks and limit the reduction in carbon emission.

badpun6• 4 years ago

In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity

All these ideas about plastering the world with millions of tons of solar panels makes me worry about what happens in say 50 years from now. Recycling all of that stuff may prove to be pointless from economic perspective and we may end up with millions of tons of dead pannels in a small-country-sized landfill.

WalterBright15• 4 years ago

Europe would then become the vassal of whoever is running Libya with their hand on the circuit breaker.

lenkite• 4 years ago

No worries - There will be another NATO "freedom/democracy" mission as soon as that occurs.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

States will be trading fresh water for clean energy

stefan_2• 4 years ago

Even places that are not very sunny get a preposterous amount of sun energy per square meter and solar is in any case to be synergistically combined with wind energy. This is a total non-concern, nobody needs to start building in Libya of all places.

jvanderbot• 4 years ago

Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of the meat here.

"Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option."

Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs.

"On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite.
"At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

I've seen people saying "Alaska shows that nuclear is needed, as wind/solar don't work well there." They don't mention that the average power level on the largest grid in Alaska is just 600 MW. And Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, the northern half of Canada.

intrasight3• 4 years ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.

dhritzkiv• 4 years ago

I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances

Mil0dV• 4 years ago

This is undesirable in the same way shipping water via trucks is a lot less efficient than using pipes.

For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again.

Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.

natch• 4 years ago

For places and times without sun there are other solutions such as natural gas. We are not trying to entirely eliminate all uses of fossil fuels for energy; just reduce them drastically where practical. There is also nuclear (longer time scale), hydro, wind, batteries, and transmission lines, among others.

You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.

katkatkatkatket7• 4 years ago

The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe

It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert?

The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves.

This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?

katkatkatkatket7• 4 years ago

I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km, comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each, and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them, that's 2e5 truck loads.

The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.

fauigerzigerk• 4 years ago

We wouldn't want to import all our electricity from one country anyway, even if that country wasn't quite as unstable as Libya.

A more realistic option for the UK might be a submarine HVDC link to Morocco, sort of a bigger version of Viking Link project, which connects the UK to Denmark. I'd like to know if the technology exists to imort, say, 5% of our electricity via that route.

geertj• 4 years ago

Any such system would probably use DC, which would be much more compact than what you describe.

philipkglass4• 4 years ago

Electricity consumption in the UK in 2021 was 294.4 TWh:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu...

Annualized, that's an average power of 33.5 GW.

On http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you can see in the yearly demand view that peak demand for the year was under 40 GW.

This initial estimate of 150 km^2 of desert solar farms is too small and your later estimate of 13,000 km^2 is too large. A conservative rule of thumb would be 10 megawatts (real power, annualized) per km^2 of solar farm, which would mean 3,350 km^2 of solar farms for 33,500 average megawatts. Note that solar farm area is larger than solar panel area because solar farms need space between racks of panels.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

How big would the power line be

The linked blog post explains that it doesn't have to be a power line. You could synthesize LNG and ferry that elsewhere (that is, assuming the techniques described do indeed scale, and you don't have salty water trouble, etc. etc. etc)

bernardlunn• 4 years ago

Yep & check out: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

jillesvangurp5• 4 years ago

Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here.

I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year.

Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

Germany cancelled projects in Africa with HVDC cables up-continent when solar panel cost dropped to the point that they can just buy enough local panels to meet power needs.

Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.

katkatkatkatket7• 4 years ago

a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables

I found a press release - the company is "Xlinks". The project doesn't pass the sniff test - they casually mention a 20GWh battery as part of the plan, which would be 10x bigger than the world's current biggest battery storage (2000MWh, at Moss Landing, California. Ironically it's only just come back online after a several month outage due to another fire)

ehnto• 4 years ago

There is another such project going on now, to connect Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector. Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this stage).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...

locallost2• 4 years ago

One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy. Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to mention that countries want to be energy independent, which would be another improvement to the situation we are currently in.

rocqua8• 4 years ago

I wonder if depance between countries helps avoid wars. It certainly raises the costs, which prevents war being profitable.

uhtred• 4 years ago

The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable

I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

Look at how well Europe's dependence on Russian gas is going.

JohnHaugeland13• 4 years ago

Solar fans really want to cover entire countries in panels, instead of just building nuclear power

"We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully.

We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up

Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from.

People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices.

It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.

fermentation• 4 years ago

In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the phenomenon of “curtailment” where we can’t use solar power when and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production.

Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.

outworlder4• 4 years ago

Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production.

In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.

Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.

I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.

zbrozek7• 4 years ago

I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array, a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.

tuatoru5• 4 years ago

We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky.

Yeah, Jerry Pournelle used to say on this topic, "it's raining soup, and we're too stupid to hold out a bowl."

Well, now we're at least holding out a few soup spoons, and making some more every year.

distrill• 4 years ago

tbh i just skip solar panels. it's such a grind. by the time i can make them at scale, i need so many of them, and i hate placing them. even with pretty OP construction bots it's not worth the effort IMO.

this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.

i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.

adgjlsfhk12• 4 years ago

Solar power in Factorio pairs really well with spidertron. You can give it a bunch of bots, and an automated production line and it just builds itself. The only hard part is to make sure to always keep power growing rather than only expanding when you need more power.

tuatoru5• 4 years ago

Real life will probably move on from panels, too. PV will be made on big rolls of plastic film (like mylar or kapton), laid out on the ground. Think 3 meters wide by a kilometre long.

intrepidhero• 4 years ago

I get sabatier and electrolysis but what is a CO2 concentrator? Or rather how does it work? I thought that was the expensive and relatively unknown part of the process.

Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/

AdamTReineke2• 4 years ago

Their white paper covers it, linked from their site.

CO2 concentration is performed using a closed lime/calcite calcination cycle, operating at ambient temperature and pressure.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...

outworlder4• 4 years ago

Can I borrow one for my Sodastream? :)

seltzered_3• 4 years ago

Website seems like the opposite of one of their competitors, https://www.prometheusfuels.com/

rob_c2• 4 years ago

And a lot of so far non existent recycling technologies and resources...

seltzered_3• 4 years ago

This is an important point. There was a recent article inquiring the issues in recycling solar panels installed 20-25 years ago: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california... .

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

That is pure fossil industry propaganda. There is no cadmium in ordinary terrestrial solar panels. The lead, if it’s there at all, is in the solder and easily recovered by a pass through a 300-degree intake process. All of the solar panels installed in California, ever, would easily fit in the parking lot of Dodgers stadium, stacked to a reasonable height. They are non-toxic, insoluble bulk crystalline materials.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

90% of a solar panel is recyclable. However, it's only necessary to do so once the panel is no longer economically viable, and panels are generally warrantied to produce 80%+ of their nameplate capacity after 20+ years.

In the EU and elsewhere there's a healthy market in used panels; when a large scale installation upgrades to newer/better panels, the used panels go on the market and end up in places where people don't care about the efficiency per area.

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

"Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas."

That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.

standardUser3• 4 years ago

Can anyone provide a summary of this blog post? I am finding it strangely tricky to follow.

jtolmar2• 4 years ago

Terraform Industries has a process for converting atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons (particularly "natural" gas), at the cost of a huge amount of electricity.

Because solar panels keep getting cheaper and oil doesn't, they think they can out-compete the cost of oil in some markets (sunny with expensive oil) in the near future, and more places over time if solar power keeps getting cheaper.

The author hopes to encourage a huge investment in solar power, which would be good for the planet and people in general (and unstated, also Terraform's bottom line).

standardUser3• 4 years ago

Thank you, that is what I gathered, give or take. I guess I was just taken aback by the idea that instead of displacing natural gas we would use more energy to make natural gas. Seems like the ultra-gargantuan investments needed for this kind of transition would be better spent transitioning to a mostly-electric energy economy.

scaramanga4• 4 years ago

Looks like hopium peddling around their new invention which will solve climate change (spoiler alert: it absolutely won't) and generate limitless energy at the same time (spoiler alert: we have effectively limitless energy in the form of fossil fuels, and even if you ignore climate change, we have already used it to basically destroy our own future by treating the earth as a garbage dump / shithole to be asset stripped of everything of worth to convert it into worthless landfill while basic human needs are still unmet).

Let me know if you're interested and PM be because, gosh, do I have the investment opportunity of a lifetime for you. /s :)

osigurdson• 4 years ago

> but the energy demands are astronomical

Maybe not the best idea then.

StevenWaterman• 4 years ago

If energy production is increasing exponentially, an astronomical demand very quickly becomes manageable and then trivial

The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi

akira25012• 4 years ago

A monoculture of generation and distribution technologies is not a desirable outcome from an engineering perspective. Your goal shouldn't be to put PV everywhere and then just "solve the distribution problem." You're almost certainly going to make things worse that way.

Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function.

It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.

gregschlom• 4 years ago

It sounds like you didn't read the article. They aren't talking about putting solar panels everywhere, they're talking about using massive amounts of solar panel in a specific location and use the energy to convert the CO2 in the air into methane.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

That and nobody has ever suggested that we rely solely on solar for energy needs. Wind, for example, is cheaper than solar (though solar is catching up.)

akira25012• 4 years ago

This is such an odd way to address an argument. From the article:

"Substituting solar power into our electrical grid and atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons into our fuel supply chain is just the beginning. We want to support a future of abundance and wealth, while avoiding starvation even as legacy climate damage shifts rainfall patterns and causes extreme weather."

Seems pretty one-track to me.

Also, there are no manufacturing processes with infinite scalability. And the article fails to make clear their large scale intentions. They go back and forth between some Sarahan style plant, and the total amount of PV available and the current planned excess power due to this and never offer a solid plan as far as I can tell.

Aside from that.. it's a back of the envelope analysis that just projects trend lines on charts and makes no thoughts for emergent phenomenon due to the massive market swings it projects.

outworlder4• 4 years ago

If we forget about where the power is coming from for the moment, wasn't the US Navy experimenting with fuel synthesis? Did that go anywhere?

A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer.

Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers...

300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible potential.

Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the tech.

martyvis• 4 years ago

Porsche are on to it. https://newsroom.porsche.com/en_AU/2022/sustainability/porsc...

user-one1• 4 years ago

You should check out Prometheus Fuels: https://prometheusfuels.com/

beambot• 4 years ago

A project related to the Navy project was "Project Foghorn" at GoogleX: https://x.company/projects/foghorn/

A better technology is currently being scaled up at Prometheus Fuels: https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...

mgerdts4• 4 years ago

There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details.

Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.

Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.

Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.

greenthrow2• 4 years ago

It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.

I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.

gibolt2• 4 years ago

Solar is already extremely cheap, when costed out over it's minimal lifetime. At grid scale, it has dipped down to crazy levels.

As you said, this trend will keep on going.

mgerdts4• 4 years ago

Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad idea.

mgerdts4• 4 years ago

It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.

That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.

johncearls• 4 years ago

But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air. There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions of years ago that's creating the excess.

goethes_kind3• 4 years ago

Why do you not believe in synthetic hydrocarbons? What else do you believe is a better alternative then?

NovaVeles• 4 years ago

I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).

I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.

Nzen• 4 years ago

While desalination requires disposing of all the waterborne particulate, the water can sometimes be precious enough that we bear it. I heard a radio report yesterday [0] about how investing in desalination helped mitigate USA CA Catalina Island's direly depleted resivoir. That's not to say that brine treatment or disposal isn't costly, more that - so long as people are committed to living in dry areas and can afford to, they will pressure their local governments to keep the area habitable.

[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2022/07/18/drought-technology-po...

elil17• 4 years ago

Not a full answer to this issue yet there’s a lot of work being done in getting solids (either to landfill or to use for something) from desal brine.

edrxty• 4 years ago

Tangential but hits on google isn't really a metric for...anything at all.

For instance, "potatoes cause cancer" give us 14,900,000 results. Potatoes do not cause cancer.

asveikau• 4 years ago

Here we go, a other person in the tank for big potato ...

jillesvangurp5• 4 years ago

This comes up a lot when desalination is mentioned. Think of the pacific as a bucket of water. And desalinating all the water we ever need adds up to tiny fraction of a drop of water in comparison. Now the brine is an even tinier fraction of that drop that goes back in the bucket. What does it do to ppm counts of things like salt? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.

There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.

Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.

leobg3• 4 years ago

What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill my house’s tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that something that would be technically feasible today?

ttyyzz2• 4 years ago

Hydrogen. This is my neighbor: https://hoermannsolar.de/wohnen-im-wasserstoffhaus/

manmal3• 4 years ago

I keep reading that H2 storage is difficult, lossy, and dangerous. H2 gas stations have blown up every now and then. Has that changed?

zizee2• 4 years ago

Why convert to gas for heating later when you can just store heat itself?*

There was an article/discussion here recently about heat batteries using sand to store heat for months, to use for heating in winter. This tech seems fairly simple to implement at scale.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006791

*This is a rhetorical question, I'm sure everyone can easily think of many benefits. But there is elegance in simplicity.

sbierwagen3• 4 years ago

In the residential context, the magic word here is "ground source heat pump". A really big coolant loop that stores heat underground. Depending on the jurisdiction and loop size, figure it will cost $15,000+

brazzy4• 4 years ago

Storing heat for months requires really, really good insulation, and insulating many small stores is far more expensive than insulating one big store (essentially a square-cube thing).

So this kind of thing may only be viable for industrial processes.

leobg3• 4 years ago

Sounds great!

I wonder: Why is sand better than the dirt that’s already on site? Dirt, after all, contains water, which I believe should have an even higher thermal capacity, or not?

Also: How about combining this approach with a heat pump instead of resistive heating?

elihu4• 4 years ago

Another use of natural gas is to make fertilizer. Maybe you'd use a different process though if your end goal is to make ammonia? (I'm not an expert, but it seems you'd use electrolyzed hydrogen either way, but Haber Bosch reacts with nitrogen instead of CO2.)

taf2• 4 years ago

Why don’t we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point that we can store enough energy for everyone

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

Because they are too expensive and take too long to build. One gets much more CO2 reduction per $, and much more quickly, from spending on renewables.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

Regulated one to be too expensive, subsidized the other to be cheap.

The arguments against nuclear are always a direct result of the previous set of arguments rooted mostly in panic, lack of education, and three small scope issues that range from unlikely to impossible now. But yea. You are right, we made nuclear too expensive to be viable.

acyou• 4 years ago

In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a closed system requires net energy input across the system boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy input than smaller increases of concentration.

Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high.

For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.

celtain• 4 years ago

Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.

Ideally we'll get to a point where every CO2 point source either stops being a point source, already has a mechanism for capturing the emissions, or can't economically accommodate carbon capture for some other reason (airplanes, probably).

At that point we might still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We'd have to figure out some way to get it out, whether that's by manufacturing hydrocarbons, planting trees, something else, or all of the above.

kragen16• 4 years ago

It's curious that you didn't actually include the calculation of what the minimum energy requirement; instead, you just assert without evidence that it is "very, very, very high".

In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.

Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?

Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.

usrusr• 4 years ago

Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.

But it certainly can: by capturing on a point source that burns biological fuel. Without the burning, all the CO2 emitted (or captured) would have cycled back to the air a short time later anyways. And if you mainly do it to have a cheap carbon source to make some intermittent energy source you already have storable/transportable (e.g. creating aircraft fuel), just about any low grade biomass will do. Grass. Leaves. Dried algae. Paper too dirty for recycling (or rather: any paper - does paper recycling even make any sense in an economy that also burns wood for energy?). When you start looking at incineration not as disposal and/or energy source, but as a source of concentrated CO2, almost anything turns into a useful resource. All that stuff contains carbon, and it's all going back into the atmosphere one way or another.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

Electro-swing absorption works efficiently at ambient levels:

https://verdox.com/technology

emtel• 4 years ago

Point source capture is pointless: We need the capacity to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Capturing every molecule of CO2 emitted at its source wouldn’t solve global warming.

antishatter• 4 years ago

Solar is a meme, nuclear is the only way we get the grid off carbon.

acidburnNSA4• 4 years ago

You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.

kragen16• 4 years ago

Nuclear power plants cannot operate in the Sahara Desert; they need access to cooling water.

acidburnNSA4• 4 years ago

They'd have to use dry cooling in that environment. A bit more cost but fully doable. You can reject 375 degreeC core heat even in the Sahara

laxk• 4 years ago

The question here is how to distribute it around the world?

flatline• 4 years ago

And my 11 year old daughter says that Jeff Bezos could solve world hunger if he just gave away part of his fortune. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way.

thangalin• 4 years ago

He did give away part of his fortune. Twice. As you implied, hunger remains unsolved.

* https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/media/van-jones-bezos-100-mil...

* https://www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/press-room/jeff-bezo...

I'm working on a sci-fi book wherein a young girl solves world hunger; alpha readers wanted (see profile).

skybrian• 4 years ago

This article seems rather hand-wavy. I would have liked to seen more about what the physical and economic limits might be. In particular, how the cost of the solar panels themselves compare with all the other costs needed to get a working plant.

Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?

philipkglass4• 4 years ago

See section 5.2 of this report:

"U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmark: Q1 2020"

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf

For a 100 megawatt utility-scale solar farm with one-axis sun tracking hardware built in the US, total costs come to $1.01 per watt-peak of direct current generating capacity. Solar modules account for $0.41 of that. Other hardware (inverters, electrical balance of system, and structural balance of system) accounts for $0.24. Installation labor and equipment is $0.11. The cost of land is tiny, too small to actually see in the stacked bar chart, but below $0.02.

Solar module costs can fall by another 70% before labor costs start to become an equally relevant cost element. There are already companies working on automating additional elements of solar farm construction. You can see a brief video of AES's Atlas robot for solar farm module installation here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFDhHa3eKY

AES claims that with this robot, a crew of only 3 people can install a megawatt of panels in a week:

https://www.aes.com/reimagining-solar

You could install all the panels for a 100 megawatt solar farm like that analyzed above with 6 months and 12 people.

mmaunder• 4 years ago

The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it.

Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.

We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.

Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.

Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.

windows2020• 4 years ago

Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming.

Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?

I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.

jakear• 4 years ago

Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?

Yes, see: every “invasive” species. Or bacterial infection.

amelius• 4 years ago

Ban advertising, and let the world go back to yellow pages.

A good first step towards solving the overconsumption problem.

mtlmtlmtlmtl2• 4 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted.

Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.

Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.

I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.

Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.

Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?

Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.

The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.

I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure.

Creating a solar panel that never needed to be replaced and could be manufactured at the same price as less-durable alternatives would make you very rich. Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?

Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.

It’s much less sinister than that. Many modern societies are structured under the assumption that there’s many more young people than old people, so the young people can share the load of caring for the elderly who are no longer able to work. When you have a sudden in fertility rates, the ratio of young:old goes down, and each young person has to contribute a larger percentage of their effort into caring for the elderly. That’s not necessarily a pleasant responsibility to put on young people, or a position I’d want to be put in as an older person

blurker3• 4 years ago

Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?

Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.

It's incredibly common.

hackerlight• 4 years ago

You have it backwards. Solar panels are a fungible commodity good with no differentiation besides quality and cost. The financial incentive points strongly in the direction of longevity.

tick_tock_tick• 4 years ago

Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.

Until we find evidence otherwise we are literally the only valuable thing in existence. So yes hyper-growth is the path forward. If it ruins the planet we'll fix it later or come up with enough of a stopgap to get us to the next milestone.

toolz2• 4 years ago

The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem

Why do people just love to hate on their own existence? How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?

If earth is to flourish, grow and continue it's trend of supporting ever more complex forms of life - it will be humans that can make that happen. In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event (maybe even _with_ humans, but certainly no other species on earth has had the capacity to maybe stop one of these events from happening)

Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.

brtkdotse5• 4 years ago

How many extinction events have there been that just wiped out the vast majority of species far before humans even existed?

Those weren’t caused by the species themselves though

badpun6• 4 years ago

In the absence of humans, earth is just awaiting another mass extinction event

Spoiler: the next mass extinction event is already happening, and it's caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

blurker3• 4 years ago

Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.

This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.

seandoe• 4 years ago

I appreciate this all-too-rare take. It concerns me that it's so popular to be negative. I believe a lot more good can come about with a positive attitude -- honest and critical at times, yes, but at some point you just gotta put your boots on and get to work.

kalleboo• 4 years ago

Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure

It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.

jillesvangurp5• 4 years ago

So, the good news is that we can generate all the power we will ever need from the sun using cheap solar panels that will last a very long time.

You are mixing up a few trends here. The world population is expected to peak at around 10 billion people end of this century. Some places will indeed have shrinking populations but that isn't true everywhere. Aside from genocide at a really monstrous scale, the reality of a population that big is that it will consume resources and energy whether we like it or not.

Given that, solar power is a cheap and clean solution that with price and production growth trends suggested in the article might be more than enough much sooner than some people seem to think. Exponentials are funny like that.

Energy generation is a dirty business today. This seems like it is the whole premise for your negativity. Here is a fix that seems on track to challenge that whole notion. The beauty with things like this is that they have a certain inevitability about them. Population growth creates the demand for energy. Meeting that demand improves the economics. And at some point the problem melts away. The wheels for that have been in motion for a while now. And all the article suggests is that we are going to be fine a bit sooner than some people thought. Extrapolate current trends and it adds up to synthetic fuel being cheaper than fossil fuel.

holografix• 4 years ago

Can someone point me to a “loss of performance” type formula for solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90° and “sunshine strength” as the sun rises and dips in the sky?

tambourine_man• 4 years ago

It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.

It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.

epistasis5• 4 years ago

The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big barrier is political.

There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.

And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.

tppiotrowski4• 4 years ago

I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet.

Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?

shanghaikid• 4 years ago

China dominates industry.

maerF0x03• 4 years ago

The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically.

Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis.

Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.

Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy.

But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios...

Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject.

[1]: Chapter on solar: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

Without Hot Air and this blog are polar opposites. Without Hot Air uses costs from 2008 and assumes that they won't improve.

The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong.

OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.

maerF0x03• 4 years ago

While the cost of the hardware has, many factors still apply such as efficiency and thusly the total area of solar required.

You're right though that the book is not up to date, and getting long in the tooth in some aspects.

otherme123• 4 years ago

What trend makes you think nuclear is going to make a paradigm shift?

I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.

Willish42• 4 years ago

Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever?

Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.

Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN

blurker3• 4 years ago

I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless.

Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.

ianai• 4 years ago

“Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas”

Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural gas underground in the same areas we’ve been taking it out? Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little carbon sequestration.

(Can’t be sure with myself whether I’m serious or sarcastic in this one. But I definitely want carbon out of the air…)

sbierwagen3• 4 years ago

If you're doing carbon sequestration you skip the part where you convert it to methane and just sequester the captured CO2.

Given the scale of the problem, something like that will (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a political solution, eventually every current natural gas well will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were.

However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture, barring nanotech magic, will be done via enhanced weathering or tree burial.

xbmcuser• 4 years ago

If they make it profitable to get carbon out of the air which this suggests it will get a lot of private investments. This will also make carbon worth something so instead of letting it out in the atmosphere there will be effort to capture and sell it to the solar methane generators.

danschumann• 4 years ago

I mean if we suck it out of the air and put it back in cars, then we close the loop, right? No more externalities?

azinman2• 4 years ago

Given all of the factors involved to manufacture the capacity the author is talking about (we'll ignore labor & land costs to install), wouldn't it be better to put that into cheaper/safer/smaller nuclear power? It already runs 24/7 with no CO2.

epistasis5• 4 years ago

Run the numbers, I don't think there's any chance of nuclear providing any sort of economic competition. Even at hopelessly optimistic prices like $7k/kW overnight cost, nuclear is at a huge disadvantage to current solar pricing. Much less the pricing for solar at halfway through the nuclear reactor's life, 20-30 years from now.

Additionally, we have little hope of scaling nuclear construction capacity to meet the necessary demand. Whereas solar/wind/storage is way ahead and scaling at ridiculously high rates.

Spend 5 years building a reactor, and you get a some number of GW. Spend that same construction capacity building mines and factories, and you get some GW/year additional production capacity.

Construction capacity is fixed, really bad, and productivity has not increased in years. Applying that construction capacity to nuclear is a linear attack to energy production. Applying that construction capacity to solar/wind/storage is an exponential attack on energy production.

zmix• 4 years ago

Article has very good wording!

scaramanga4• 4 years ago

As in many times more solar panels than can be constructed with all of the resources that can possibly ever be extracted from the earth? I suppose that is true, and an be verified with some pretty simple back of the envelope calculations.

I must admit, I only skimmed through the apparently meaningless technobabble, but if someone could let me know succinctly, we still don't have anything more effective at carbon sequestration that trees, right? And how well are trees doing?

hedora2• 4 years ago

Capturing a gallon of gasoline CO2 emissions from the atmosphere would cost about a dollar at scale. (1 gallon -> 20lbs CO2. Technologies advertising $100/ton of CO2 are somewhat common these days. A ton is 2000lbs, so $100 / ton CO2 implies $1 per gallon of gasoline). There are many technologies that could achieve this, but I don’t think this article is describing one of them.

They want to convert CO2 and water to natural gas and have roughly 30% energy efficiency. A gallon of gas contains 33kWh, so (handwave gasoline == natural gas), it costs 100kWh per gallon equivalent. A kilowatt hour is at least $0.10, so > $10 per gallon-captured-ish.

If the carbon intensity of natural gas is similar to gasoline, so the computation is close enough and the technology in the article is about 10x off state of the art.

On the bright side, the article’s technology would “only” require 5% of the earth’s surface be covered in solar panels, so state of the art would need 0.5%, which is feasible, in terms of land use, at least.

Carbon intensity table: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/b...

InDemoVeritas• 4 years ago

Is there enough silver to make 300 TW capacity of solar panels?

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

Silver is not absolutely needed. Copper can be used for front contacts, but it has to be separated from the silicon by a thin layer of nickel or molybdenum to prevent reaction of the copper with the silicon.

bratwurst3000• 4 years ago

I once estimated that it need the surface area of spain to power all of the world. Asuming all energy is electricity at that point. And I only took bad numbers like 100w sqm for 2-3 h a day.

So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.

hedora2• 4 years ago

I really want carbon capture to work, but arguing from first principles, I think the approach in the paper will be a niche product, and is probably a decade too early. (I honestly do wish them well.)

Feel free to poke holes in my math:

From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by three below.

They propose using this for natural gas production for home heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have coefficients of power above four, in practice.

So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient; they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it. Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly.

With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand! Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the weekend.)

On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications:

There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just" break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's much better than net zero.

As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have already ramped carbon capture!

briantakita• 4 years ago

Abiotic genesis of petroleum

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

Observed abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/402_20...

alex_young• 4 years ago

Are synthetic hydrocarbons more efficient energy storage than li batteries? Seems unlikely.

alvah5• 4 years ago

Efficiency isn't the goal here. Energy density & re-using existing infrastructure are the points.

caseyf7• 4 years ago

Why is China’s photovoltaic potential so low?

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

Cloudiness in the populated eastern/southeastern part of the country.

Tibet's insolation is really good, though.

oxff• 4 years ago

Just use nuclear power.

Helmut100018• 4 years ago

People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert.

I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).

Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.

So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).

.. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].

[1] https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX

[2] https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/

jnsaff22• 4 years ago

With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation.

I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is overkill for them.

Helmut100018• 4 years ago

Yes, absolutely - the house is a pretty big country side house from 1925, not uncommon in Germany. But (almost) impossible to insulate efficiently. My estimates where €150k to €200k, just for the insulation, windows, and renewed heaters. In comparison, an 'oversized' 70 kWp PV only costs €100k, and also returns some income when not all of the power is used.

The parameters widely differ between country and city: In the country, you usually have space (but lack money), in the city, you lack space but can often work with a pretty good income (= build a new, energy optimized house).

Every house is different. If I build a new house today, of course this would look different.

dmitriid7• 4 years ago

With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation.

With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's.

You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.

ekianjo• 4 years ago

better insulation

better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

The catch is that power-to-gas tech described in the article will allow you to store the power produced in summer.

Produce excess methane gas in summer, store with existing infrastructure, burn it for baseload/winter.

m12k• 4 years ago

From the article:

"Just as converting chemical energy in the form of fuel into electricity endures 45-75% thermodynamic losses, converting electricity back into chemical fuels loses 60-70% of the energy in the process. Converting solar power into natural gas only to burn it in a gas turbine power plant could help with long term seasonal energy storage but is so much less cost competitive than other ways to stabilize electricity supply that we should expect this usage modality in, at most, niche cases."

JohnHaugeland13• 4 years ago

The catch is that power-to-gas tech described in the article

isn't real

belorn2• 4 years ago

The whole article is basically about the question if solar power will continue to drop in price and if power-to-gas tech can have a similar drop in price. If those two are true then power-to-gas will become economical viable to the point where people could use it to store power produced in the summer to be burned for baseload/winter. It will also mean that pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, in compressed storage, will be is expected to reach a point where they are too cheap the meter.

Of course we are not there now. 2030 maybe? 2040?

choeger2• 4 years ago

I think with 30kWp you should be able to heat enough sand to make it over the winter. It's a matter of space and finding someone to build you that heat storage.

Helmut100018• 4 years ago

Currently, it is cheaper though to "sell" the electricity in summer and "buy" it back in winter (even if it is at 10x the price I sold it for). Compared to private long term storage solutions. Most long term electricity storage solutions will yield electricity at prices above 80c/kWh here (even lithium ion is currently around 50 to 70c, if you calculate 10,000 hrs average lifetime of house batteries). And you cannot use lithium ion for long term storage, you would need H2, or heat storage solutions.

walrus0125• 4 years ago

30KW STC rating of PV panels does not product much cumulative kWh at all in December and January at latitudes 40+. Forget the sand he just doesn't have the watt hours to run electric heaters at all.

benevol• 4 years ago

Have you considered https://www.KryonEngine.org ?

spaniard892772• 4 years ago

What im looking at?

the8472• 4 years ago

I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).

I know there are sun-following installations but those need expensive mechanics and control systems. Aren't there middle-ground solutions that can be manually adjusted twice a year?

Bombthecat• 4 years ago

If 70 to 80 is enough in winter,I would assume that it is enough in summer?

bartwe• 4 years ago

Sounds like the next step should be long-term at-home storage through generation of solid or liquid fuels.

jonnycomputer4• 4 years ago

Given the increasing duck-curve [https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-solar-power-duck-c...] of solar energy production, this makes sense to me, economics and efficiency concerns aside.

nl3• 4 years ago

Surely utility level wind power can fill parts of that gap?

Utility level solar is much more effective too of course.

tluyben2• 4 years ago

In north-west eu maybe, in south-west not so much; I have had solar for 20 years in different houses in the south and it covers more than enough all year round (we are off grid). During the days, summer and winter, you can switch on whatever as it will never run out; during the night it obviously depends on the amount and quality of batteries. I have had 1 moment without power and that was a rare event for that location: snow covering the solar panels.

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

You're still seeing a large swing in insolation between summer and winter in SW Europe. You can tilt the PV arrays to increase winter production at the expense of summer (and at expense of overall production); did you do that?

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

Places without enough sun in the winter, and without enough wind, too, sometimes, will just import power. You might be able to draw down on HVDC transmission lines. But there will also be abundant solar farms in the tropics synthesizing ammonia for export. If the weather prediction says not enough wind, and your tanked ammonia would run low, and you can't book enough transmission line power, you just order a shipment, which will be substantially cheaper than NG, from anybody anywhere.

But you will have overbuilt a great deal of cheap solar capacity, because anytime it generates more than you can use, you can synthesize your own ammonia. First you fill your tanks, and then sell the rest.

In winter, the overbuild means you burn less of it. In summer, the excess ammonia will find an unlimited market because ammonia is so useful. It is fuel, it is fertilizer, it is refrigerant, it is feedstock for myriad chemical processes.

pcdoodle2• 4 years ago

I had no idea ammonia had such properties, any recommended readings/video?

ZeroGravitas6• 4 years ago

If you're on a farm, then vertical bi-facial aligned west/east, or even north/south, or some mix, can radically shift the power output as required.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S26669552220002...

The summer peak drops but the winter rises to compensate. Daily peak is spread out too, which helps match heat pumps that like to run continuously and battery storage can cycle twice per day.

Figures for Germany, but Norwegian researchers suggest it has benefits at their latitude too.

MilaM• 4 years ago

The question is, if complete energy autonomy is even that desirable. From an economic perspective I think it makes sense to use the grid as a kind of battery. Sell surplus energy to the grid in summer, buy it back in winter (ideally renewable) and let the utilities deal with the headache of balancing supply/demand and storage.

Also, solar panel efficiency is still increasing at a steady pace. A gain of 50% compared to the average efficiency of currently sold panels seems to be achievable in a couple of years. 20% vs. 30% could be all you need to improve your calculation.

rocqua8• 4 years ago

What I found cool about the synthetic natural gas, is that Europe already has really good seasonal storage of natural gas. Hence the infrastructure is available for summer-time generation of gas using solar abundance that we use in winter for heating.

To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by stockpiling on seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent production, things will get hairy in winter.

Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.

Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.

throwaways85989• 4 years ago

I think methanol is even a better storage candidate. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-me...

threatripper• 4 years ago

If we produce considerably more electricity than we can use it becomes essentially free energy at those times. Then it could make sense to convert it into gas instead of extracting gas from the earth. Until then the extracted gas will be cheaper and overall more efficient. Local availability of natural gas can be a problem at times, tough.

future_i_snow• 4 years ago

Northern Africa has a huge opportunity here - build infra that produces hydrogen gas year round, and then export it to Europe. The Sahara Desert is 8_600_000 km², which I imagine is _very sunny_ all year round.

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

This is Northern Europe, tho. 95% of the world’s population gets much, much better solar…

krzyk2• 4 years ago

Other places get much more heat, which is not good for solar.

stolsvik• 4 years ago

Wasn't the article exactly about this need for a massive over capacity of installed PV, and that it still is possible to do?

M_bara• 4 years ago

Just wondering, isn’t it viable to have Solar arrays in the Sahara/equator regions and have the power transmitted to temperate zones? Is the transmission the issue? Is it politics? Super conductors? I’d love to know why we can’t have a follow the sun global grid…

kristianp• 4 years ago

There is a plan afoot to cable electricity from an Australian solar farm to Singapore, so these things may be in the future: https://suncable.energy/

konschubert3• 4 years ago

Politics. Look what's happening to Germany with Russian gas.

kkfx• 4 years ago

I have a small 5kWp PV at home, with a small lithium storage (8kWh) just to cover my arse in case of outage, since here (French Alps) there is a very big day-night thermal delta it's very good in summer, where at night I just need the VMC in passive mode and A/C only during the day, for the rest it's enough for heating sanitary water almost ONLY from the Sun, winter included, and to run some appliances (dishwasher, washing machine etc) in self-consumption. Doing more is needed for trying to charge an EV from PV during the day, likely the double at minimum, but to heat the house in winter OR:

- I need a very expensive battery (60kWh/~30k€ at least just to avoid big daily deep discharge cycles) who might or might not last 10 years with an expensive geothermal heat-pump 15k€ at least;

- I need a giant insulated, probably underground for mere easiness of design, pool and PV plant (I do not know how to estimate but surely few swimming pools of water and enough PV to heat it) to store enough heat for the night.

Both options are ridiculously expensive especially since they still NOT give autonomy since they can support day-to-day winter IF the Sun shine enough, witch might but also might not happen. Perhaps in a future H₂ from hydrolysis will be on sale to offer a fuel-cell third option, but I imagine it will be even more expensive.

So far it's still FAR, FAR, FAR, cheaper using the grid + an emergency wood based heating. Long story short I might accept investing (I'm actually in the planning stage) a 15kWp or so PV for an EV charging (WFH so without daily car usage) but trying more is just money gifted to some company pocket. Oh BTW that's JUST for private homes. We also have public buildings AND industry...

SergeAx• 4 years ago

How viable in terms of performance/(cost+trouble) it is to motorize panels to change only horizontal angle, without full tracking?

Schroedingersat2• 4 years ago

I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).

Have you considered a thermal battery? A cubic meter or ten of NaOH solution can store a surprising amount of energy, and can be charged during summer/spring/autumn with simple solar modules consisting of black pipes in glass.

Even if you only store half the energy needed for some of December and January, it halves the needed size of modules.

Hydrogen electrolysis is also shockingly cheap, if there were some safe, small scale storage this issue would be solved.

KingOfCoders2• 4 years ago

My Casio watch is solar powered and the "panel" can't be seen becaue it's too small and incorporated in the design (btw. best watch ever, <$100, solar, radio, Gshock). We will film print "panels" everywhere, all office buildings, all cars.

If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.

ngcc_hk• 4 years ago

3 important take

1. Is Solar economic viable?

Not sure “ Crude oil prices are between $60 and $100/barrel, indicating cost parity at between $10 and $17/MWh. There are already solar farms installed in some places that sell power at these prices, and between now and 2030 solar costs should come down at least another 60%.”. But $60 is high. Obviously not now but just months ago we talked about selling oil for loss.

Freaking is $40 somewhat I remember

2. The artificial Russian invasion of Ukraine

The tyranny of Russia need 10 years to resolve. And solar might work in this decade abd hope his learning curve continue.

3. Local game to play like river

The play like conversion of solar back to ch4 (methane) or sea to river etc only make sense in a few place. It is local.

In fact one wonder why Australia and Sahara desert is not more solar.

4. Transportation might be hard

1/3 lost to cable. Still as a guy demo you need a hugh solar plant farm to do one house. Still need solar farm and storage via many means.

pixiemaster• 4 years ago

in WW2, we moved to war economy to build multiple planes per hour, multiple landing ships per day etc, all while rubber, steel, oil, where in short supply.

we should do this again with solar panels.

a vast overproduction of solar energy would even allow for less distribution need, doing away with wasting time&energy on hydrogen and batteries.

betwixthewires8• 4 years ago

All that gas and oil was once a massive biological solar panel, covering much of the ocean, absorbing sunlight, storing it, reproducing, growing only to get subducted and stored for us, like a battery. For a billion years.

When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world, razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that without doing more environmental damage than our current state of affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it.

If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three quarters of the world's human population, along with the livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed that was made from oil.

It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think we should do it?

tppiotrowski4• 4 years ago

I think solar panels are a bit more efficient at converting sunlight > electricity than the chemical process of sunlight > photosynthesis > decomposition > burning fossil fuel. Take the ICE that only coverts something like 20% of fuel into motion, the rest is lost to heat. The electric motor is far more efficient.

You'd need to update your reasoning to take into account all the efficiencies lost in the fossil fuel creation and consumption in order to generate electricity.

betwixthewires8• 4 years ago

No I don't, and I'll tell you why.

The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what, tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that of the oceans?

Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years, but let's ignore that too.

Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200 years.

I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly how much environmental damage do you think such a project would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more or less destructive than current climate change projections?

It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward: get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy that is not required by life on earth, out of material not currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking with wood and cowdung again.

Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.

MildlySerious• 4 years ago

The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless.

You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.

At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.

What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.

(Pasted this comment from [2])

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545504

betwixthewires8• 4 years ago

It's not feasible, because our population is only currently possible due to the availability of energy. We can't have global supply chains, food and medicine moving across the world, much less being produced, without oil and gas. You simply don't reduce energy consumption beyond making TV illegal without starving more than half of the people alive today.

It is by no means a solution, that's kind of my point. There is no solution. We are made of the stuff that is causing this. Something like 68% of the bioavailable nitrogen in your body was produced via the Haber Bosch process. Most of the carbon in your body was produced as a result of fossil fuel extraction.

I didn't use the phrase "population control" because it's disingenuous. What I'm talking about is culling. No matter how you dice it, reducing energy availability, paving vast parts of the world to make up for what little energy we truly need, you're talking about killing billions of people and destroying a significant portion of the living surface of the earth. These are not options. And even if they were, the environmental destruction would be worse, it wouldn't even solve anything.

It doesn't derail the conversation, it is the conversation. I'm not arguing for population control, I think the idea is disgusting. I'm pointing out simply that all these pretty ideas people keep talking about, when you look at the magnitude of the problem, they're not viable solutions. If they're not viable then a conversation talking about them should be derailed because it isn't the conversation we should be having.

stewbrew2• 4 years ago

BTW the author is the founder of a company called Terraform Industries. (Their for a commercial business strangely looking homepage: https://terraformindustries.com/.) This is funny because there is also a company called Terraform Power in the renewable business. The names of these two companies seem surprisingly close to me. Are these two somehow connected? Is this just ignorance on part of the author?

On their Twitter profile they talk about "Gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis". Which is an interesting wording for a company that doesn't even have a proper homepage.

neonsunset• 4 years ago

Or just a few nuclear power plants…

mikewarot2• 4 years ago

It seems to me we need a lot of nuclear power. In the US, we need to close the fuel cycle, reprocessing all the existing spent fuel, and building a new class of reactors that can handle the resulting fuel mix.

With this base energy supply in hand, our options are far more flexible for extracting carbon from the air, and either making fuels, or petrochemical feed stock from it.

Kon5ole3• 4 years ago

I think new nuclear is a distraction from the best solution. Closing the fuel cycle is a good idea of course but we don't know how to do that yet. Current reprocessing doesn't remove the waste it just reduces it.

Reprocessing that can entirely get rid of the waste needs a scientific breakthrough that certainly might happen, but trying to make it happen will require research centers with highly qualified staff, very expensive machinery and will take a long time to set up.

Meanwhile just about anyone can put solar panels on their roof making it possible for the state to save fuels in central power plants for use during the night. This benefit is immediate, and because anyone can do it it's currently being deployed faster than even non-reprocessing nuclear power plants can be built.

So instead of aiming for new classes of reactors I think we should build already known classes of solar panel factories and hydrogen electrolysers. Hydrogen electrolysers are insanely simple, you can build one using stuff you are likely to have in your home already.

The main argument against it at grid-scale is the efficiency, but with enough solar panels efficiency becomes basically meaningless. When you are filling your "water bottle" from the Niagara you can spill a lot and it won't matter.

mikewarot2• 4 years ago

Many of the issues you site about nuclear power have been solved. Here's a quote from an answer by acidburnNSA [1] who works in the industry, to a different story here on HN.

"Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good."

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32208505

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

<whisper>we're gonna need nuclear no matter what the "green" power people say</whisper>

wheelerof4te• 4 years ago

What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.

To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.

Large wind turbines also need a lot of space to be efficient. And you can't just place those anywhere, either. Wind turbines need strong wind to work.

Hydro power plants need water flow to generate energy. So you can't have those anywhere, of course.

The only reliable and eco-firendly way to generate power are nuclear power plants. You can build them anywhere, they produce small waste per output and they require about the same space as any coal-based plant.

Sadly, you need good experts and no bad luck to operate them safely. Otherwise, we saw what happens.

iso1631• 4 years ago

Crops under solar panels: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=planting+under+solar+panel&...

"researchers are showing how panels can increase yields and reduce water use on a warming planet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power

"As of 2020, the total worldwide offshore wind power nameplate capacity was 35.3 gigawatt"

Many areas need large amounts of cheap clean electric, but don't need them 24/7. If your CO2 sequestran or hydrogen generator or desalination only runs during the day, or when the wind is blowing, meh.

pawsforthought6• 4 years ago

Agrivoltaics [1] has enormous potential.

[1] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...

Kon5ole3• 4 years ago

What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.

You need energy storage as well, people have realized this and it's being built in most countries. Hydro however is enough on it's own, and is in fact also one of the best forms of energy storage. If you have enough hydro to cover half your needs, adding "half your needs" from wind and solar lets you save hydro for the other half (This is a huge simplification but essentially true)

Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.

I don't see where the problem is. You seem to postulate that a solar power plant needs to be built like a nuclear power plant and take up a huge area of new land. It doesn't. You can put solar where you are already doing other things.

In fact, we could just build solar roofs on existing parking lots! Shade is very nice for parked cars and the area currently used by parking lots is enough in most countries.

Also, parking lots are not used for agriculture.

I think the real thing people don't realize is just how great a solution solar power really is, because it's new and has enormous implications. So far most of the development has been done on a basically amateur level.

Distributed energy generation and decimated price of electricity will disrupt a lot of powerful incumbents, so there's bound to be some propaganda against it from many sources.

If the claims in the story are true, anyone using IEA as a source would be lead to believe that solar has no future, for example. But the actual solar developments have surpassed IEAs 20-year estimates within 1 year, 13 years in a row.

pfdietz26• 4 years ago

What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.

We don't realize it because it's not true.

alvah5• 4 years ago

You should probably read the article, before writing a highly-downvoted comment answering a completely different article.

scotty79• 4 years ago

This is fascinating technology for turning CO2 into C

https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...

guerby2• 4 years ago

Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around 400 EUR/kWh for 6000 cycles at 80% degrations, that's 0.074 EUR per kWh out the the battery.

5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh.

PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year life.

All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or two electric vehicule charging at home.

As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar production is way lower than the rest of the year.

An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it, if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar + heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity with home sized equipment (yet).

35mm• 4 years ago

I think electrolysing water into hydrogen using excess solar in the winter, then using that directly for heating in the winter would make a lot of sense.

anotherhue• 4 years ago

Hydrogen is quite difficult to store, so one would have to factor those costs in the before deciding.

affgrff2• 4 years ago

And not having to store it locally but pumping it in form of methane into the existing net could further reduce costs.

ZeroGravitas6• 4 years ago

Nice article, but one sentence annoyed me:

At current rates of production growth, the supply/demand mismatch will see a 10 year backlog between the time when local solar powered synthetic fuel production reaches cost parity with fossil sources, and when solar supply will be available to meet that demand.

I hate this use of "at current rates", it's basically a lie if you don't follow up with some kind of lower bound to go with that upper bound and people believing this is not possible, or too costly, or too late is one of the main problems.

He called out the hairy back prediction graph further up and then did basically the same thing with words.

But overall a good summary.

Symmetry• 4 years ago

In the US at least I think it would be better to describe the rate at which we add solar to the grid as limited by regulatory and grid management issues. The backlog of projects waiting to be approved, in terms of capacity, is about as large as the currently installed solar capacity. One problem here is figuring out the transmission issues related to adding new capacity, so it's not just a purely regulatory issue, but the way in which grid capacity is added assumed new plants would look more like coal plants so there are regulatory aspects to it.

But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about any of that.

pbourke• 4 years ago

I was confused about something in this article. After the natural gas is synthesized, it’s pumped into the existing NG infrastructure for heating and electricity generation? Doesn’t that emit CO2 into the atmosphere once again? Or is it such that CO2 removed >> CO2 added?

BatFastard• 4 years ago

Indeed that NG that is burned adds to CO2, but its considered neutral since it was derived from atmospheric CO2. We still need sinks for CO2 that will be removed to atmosphere. But at least we can do it cost efficiently.

djenendik• 4 years ago

As others have pointed going carbon neutral is a good step, but should we should keep in mind the CO2 ppm that will be reached at the neutrality point. Is this something that we can live with?

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

What about the toxic waste from expended panels? Since you’re going to be using “a lot of” them.

ChuckMcM3• 4 years ago

As I pointed out to Casey on Twitter as well, this strategy works really well with Nuclear as well. Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation.

My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there was any leakage of radioactive material in the even more rare event of an accident) And have that plant produce methane 24/7. It can ship the methane by pipeline to anywhere and provide heating or electricity using existing gas infrastructure.

If you made it a more complex breeder reactor (or had a breeder reactor on site and a fuel reclamation facility) it could do that essentially forever. (caveat lifetime of materials and maintenance etc).

Solar works for this too, but you have to build a lot of panels (this is the article lede of course).

This is also how fusion would change everything as well, with excess power you could spend it on making carbon neutral burnable fuels and desalinating water for mitigating droughts.

ajuc3• 4 years ago

Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation.

I very much doubt you can get higher efficiency by going

    electricity -> fuel -> pipeline -> generator

than by going

    electricity -> wires ->

And even if you just use it for heating (so you skip the last part) - it wouldn't be worth it.

In particular big turbines are about 60% efficient, ICEs are about 30% efficient and electricity -> fuel conversion is even worse.

ChuckMcM3• 4 years ago

Back when I had a class in power engineering as part of my EE program there was about a week discussing transmission line loss. The example we worked on was Hoover Dam which sends its electricity 266 miles over transmission lines to LA where the University was. It was remarkable how much energy was lost both in what are called "i2r" (I squared R) losses (that is just the transmission wires losing energy as heat) and radiation losses where the power lines are essentially very long antennas. There are lots of strategies that are employed to mitigate both kinds of losses, those strategies have their own limits as well. It is all rather more complex than just hooking a wire from point A to point B, as such things are.

The other advantage that Casey's scheme has is power generated during the day doesn't need to be consumed right away if it is stored in Methane. This is true of Nuclear power as well.

The efficiency argument weakened still further if you compare the full cost of drilling, extracting, transporting, and then burning existing "fossil fuel" sources of methane because that not only damages the environment with the contaminated ground water from fracking or other extraction methods, but adds to greenhouse gasses in the the air.

The efficiency here is that your take zero (or nearly so) carbon foot print energy generation to create fuel that has net 0 impact on warming gases in the atmosphere (it takes the CO2 out of the air which is then re-released back into the air when it is burned). For things that can't be electrified, or are better served by heat combustion. Those things are, jet fuel, heating homes, baking, etc.

The other advantage is it re-uses existing infrastructure. So on a dollars per ton reduction of CO2 it is much more efficient than existing solutions, whether you use solar or nuclear.

Like most things, efficiency is a measure of some metric with respect to two choices to achieve the same result.

The choice presented by Casey is "How do you get methane for things that use it?"

If your metric is greenhouse gas emissions you get more gas with has a much lower greenhouse gas impact. On that basis it is much more efficient whether you use Nuclear or Solar as your energy input.

jeffrallen• 4 years ago

I suspect the voters of Nevada would say, "Nimby". Maybe the DoE should make a reactor like this and put it in DC, where the voters are not allowed to say "Nimby". Anti-democracry to save the day.

ChuckMcM3• 4 years ago

As a former Nevada resident, and someone who has worked at the Test Site, I can assure you that it would be unusual if the folks living in Nevada objected. :-)

zackmorris• 4 years ago

Here is a similar project that generates kerosene and diesel from water and carbon dioxide by using a ceria-based redox reaction to convert them into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas):

https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/

The plant created 5191 liters (1371 gallons) of syngas in 9 days, whereas a Boeing 787 Dreamliner carries 126,372 liters (36,384 gallons). The conversions are not linear, but that is something like a refueled plane every 219 days, give or take an order of magnitude. Looks like the conversion efficiency is 4% but 20% is expected after recycling heat and catalyst improvements.

I find stuff like this simultaneously inspiring and devastating. The technology has arrived to easily create our own electricity and fuel without having to deal with supply chain issues around centralized photovoltaic manufacturers, yet the size of the challenge is insurmountable. There is simply no way to scale this big enough to save the natural world before global warming destroys it at the end of the century.

So, that leaves us with nuclear power (fission). I appreciate that a lot of people have worked very hard on it and have humanity's best interests at heart. But they don't understand human psychology. We all know that we've been lied to about the safety of nuclear power, but they pretend that it can be made safe. While simultaneously avoiding discussion about the externalities like nuclear waste storage, nuclear proliferation, even the inherent security issues around large centralized power generation or what will happen after wars or other emergencies force workers to abandon nuclear facilities. So I don't trust them, and that's why I don't consider nuclear to be a viable alternative, and I have an unlimited list of evidence against it so I don't bother debating it anymore.

Which leaves us with what I feel is the actual solution. Yet again, as in most things, we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. I think that we'll solve it through cultural evolution. Each of us has to get to sustainability on an individual level, then lift at least one other person (preferably someone we don't know) out of dependence. Which is still a big problem, but it's smaller than paying off a mortgage.

So everyone's gotta wake up, forget they got hoodwinked, stop listening to the wealthy and powerful people talking us out of this, and just start doing it. Be a real conservative, lead by example. Be a real liberal, pay it forward. Mourn the breakdown of our institutions that set this back 40 years. Then do something about it by evangelizing sustainability and stop voting for people who pass the buck. Help people who don't get it find their way out of cognitive dissonance.

Solarpunk is a great place to start.

rahimiali2• 4 years ago

could someone explain the benefit of storing energy as natural gas? once you burn it, doesn't it result in co2? doesn't that defeat the effort? also is natural gas really easier to pipe around than electricity?

I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for helpful guidance.

stocknoob• 4 years ago

Do you want to burn new carbon that’s in the ground, or recycle what’s already in the air?

We have tremendous infrastructure already dedicated to using natural gas (cooking, heating, transport, industrial equipment) and it won’t be electrified overnight.

First get to carbon neutral, then worry about carbon negative.

rahimiali2• 4 years ago

Thanks for making it crisp. This argument was in the article, but somehow it wasn't popping at me.

kesor• 4 years ago

Isn't this what trees do already?

And if trees don't do it "good enough", should we really replace the trees with technological mini-chemical-plants that will starve all of the CO2?

I don't get it.

Why do humans think their crazy ideas are better for nature, while at the same time it is obvious they are going to exterminate whole species when implemented.

UncleEntity2• 4 years ago

Trees don’t like it when you try to use up their stored energy and go and die on you.

nanomonkey• 4 years ago

Not to mention that we've already made great headway into transforming plants and trees into a variety of stable fuel sources that can be used to heat and power our lives during the time periods where solar panels don't generate enough electricity.

Our time would be better spent investing in making these conversion processes more reliable and efficient. Alcohol from fermentation of sugars, methane from anaerobic digestion, syngas/biogas/woodgas from gasification of woody biomass, and charcoal from the remaining carbon. All of these are fuel sources available from plants that pull in CO2 naturally from the environment, completing a cycle of energy production that doesn't alter our current CO2 levels upwards. They can be done on waste biomass left over from current agricultural processes or plants used for landscaping needs (hedges, shade trees, etc.). In fact, if you store away the carbon left over after gasification as biochar you can lower CO2 levels over time.

sn92• 4 years ago

He addresses this in the whitepaper.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/terraform-indu...

Ctrl-f "Tree" to find the FAQ.

Kosirich• 4 years ago

My dad just installed 200kW on the roof of his factory. The biggest issue is getting the blip* contract with the grid so you could sell the electricity back, and I mean that at any rate. This is by far the biggest hurdle so having an alternative to store energy that makes economic sense will be the biggest wind in the back for a lot of people wanting to do the same.

alsargent• 4 years ago

To get a sense of how many solar panels and batteries we'll need, drive around Houston, Texas some time. You'll see mile after mile of chemical refineries. Granted, some of these are for plastics and not energy production. But a lot ARE for energy production -- and it's crazy to imagine how many square miles of solar and battery factories we'll need to provide an equivalent amount of energy production.

We're going to need a lot of solar panels

Related Stories