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Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.
Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.
If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.
Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.
Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.
Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.
Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.
Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.
In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.
>>US and Russia. The two great superpowers.
If you count by how many nuclear bombs they have and the unpredictability of their governments, then sure they are.
Even without China, panel cost is mostly silicon and glass, and the manufacturing know-how is out there now. India and the US are ramping up. Prices would go up maybe 30-50% without Chinese supply, but when the hardware is only a fraction of an installed system, that barely moves the total. Labor and permitting cost more.
It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.
PVGIS is good, but I'd still run it before buying. Where we've seen it matter is the inverter and battery sizing, and shading on a specific roof. Panels are cheap, sure, but undersizing the inverter or wiring is a pain to fix later.
I put 7.2kw on my roof in Canada. Tight valley, tons of snow.
You know what I learned about all the projections and estimates?
It’s a complete waste of time .
Panels are so cheap now just slap up as many as will physically fit and get on with it. Everything else is a waste of time.
Over their 25+ year lifespan I’ll profit $25k-$30k.
It’s the no brainer of all time.
As soon as my garage build is done I’ll cover that roof in another 8kw of panels too.
I thought this was very interesting - there's the map upfront, but you can also drill into individual countries and regions with some nice tables. Some "obvious" things here, though a few surprises:
* The solar potential of a gloomy, northern locale like the UK is "only" half of somewhere sunny like Australia. Though I can imagine the swings between seasons are greater.
* Northern Canada has a surprising amount of potential, compared to European regions at the same latitude
Canada compared to Mongolia of similar latitude, has lower potential though. Apparently that is because Mongolia is a desert and has no forests, very dry and high in elevation. The cold is no issue. The panels there produce 1.8 times more. The reason that Northern Europe is worse than Canada of the same latitude is apparently because of maritime proximity that increases humidity that diffuses light. Australia doesn't have maritime climate.
These kinds of maps are very misleading. They show averages, and the averages rarely drive the costs - somebody in this thread already noted that Australia is only 2x better than the UK.
The main killer of solar is variability. Northern countries have shorter solar days during winter and can have _weeks_ of overcast days, so these countries would need some kind of backup: either long-term storage, or nuclear.
Many people in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, etc. And even some further north have done the math and it comes up positive.
You have to be realistic of course. There are a few months in the winter where they don't perform well and returns drop well below a single kwh of power. But then you might start getting some bright winter or early spring days and you go back to getting many kwh per day worth of free power as early as February or March.
It's better if you have a battery and if your local energy supplier has favorable contracts.
Long term storage seems to be a be a hobby horse that comes up in a lot of theads like this. The reality with batteries is that the overwhelmingly vast majority is for dealing with short term supply/demand fluctuation. The supply spikes are as important as the demand spikes here. Empty batteries can absorb those.
Anything beyond four hours drops off rapidly in terms of economics. And a few hours is all most energy companies need for planning to spin up or down gas (or coal in some cases) plants or decide to import/export power via cables.
As for nuclear, it's is a lot less flexible and very expensive. And in any case very little of it is coming online for the foreseeable future (next 1-2 decades). We'll get probably quite a few TW of battery, solar, and wind deployed over that time. Nuclear is going to be a rounding error on that even in the best case.
Nah, just overprovision like crazy and store what you can.
Germany has currently around 1.5kW of solar installed per person - even in October this yields double-digit GWs at 9am. They can't put all that power to use in summer, but it sure puts a damper on prices off season.
Sure, storage is still being built as there's a market for it, but for now it's still cheaper to just build more solar capacity.
Of course, banks are not risking, that the future electricity price will be low during peak solar production and they don't get their money back:
"Dama Solar was also awarded two Contracts for Difference (CfDs) by the Romanian government last year. The grants are part of a low-carbon energy-support scheme paid for with EU funds, based on CfD, which set the power price at an agreed level for 15 years."
I believe the CfD doesn't pay out during negative price periods. They have structured the project with batteries that store energy at those times and resell it via other means. So there is some risk being managed there.
I always wish maps like that would include some sort of seasonality score. Maybe a worst week / best week ratio.
As it is, the map is useful until solar goes to a double digit percentage of total yearly generation. Any higher, and seasonal places start needing backup generation capacity that is only running in winter (or during monsoon), which does violent things to electricity markets.
For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage, which I mention here frequently.
This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach. They've updated their web page to include a few more technical details, which look to make sense economically (for example, they're putting the resistive heater(s) outside the dirt piles where it/they can be easily maintained).
The round trip efficiency (RTE) might be 40%, which is actually not bad since the input power (crude DC direct from solar modules) is quite cheap, not needing inverters or a grid connection sized to that DC power. Thermal losses are < 1%/month.
The technology would work down to a scale of about 100 kW average power, which is quite small all considered. Good for village-scale microgrids or individual small industrial enterprises. Scaling up, the average power would be similar to that of a large earthen dam of the same size, only the dirt would be used for to hold heat, not hold back water in a river, and could be sited almost anywhere. Heat retention improves as the size scales up; a dirt pile of the size of the largest dams, if it had been built and heated in the Bronze Age, would still be hot inside.
> For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage
Still, adds a lot of cost and complexity onto cheap solar + 12h of chemical battery storage.
> This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach.
Pity they want to do only 400°C. Because once you go towards firebricks and >700°C, you can run practically all thermal chemical processes in a refinery or a polymer plant off the heat, and you can make electricity with a supercritical CO2 turbine at >50% efficiency (in a comparatively tiny package). At the cost of much harder engineering problems, of course.
But its probably worth solving those, because you can do interesting stuff with ultra low cost hot gas. Preheat the charge for a steel mill, design a Hall–Héroult aluminium smelter that keeps the electrolyte bath molten via a gas heat exchanger instead of electricity, ect.
And once you have several GW of guaranteed heat consumers, adding a couple of CO2 peaker turbines isn't such a big leap anymore.
With 40% RTE you're throwing away 60% of cheap summer electricity, so the economics hinge on how cheap it really is. Has anyone modeled how many hours a year the heater would actually run? If curtailment is only a few weeks, the capex per cycle looks brutal.
Volumetric energy density is pretty decent, and it's easy and safe to store (albeit heavy). The big appeal is that it seems feasible to convert coal plants while touching only their burner (there is a smallscale prototype running in Germany AFAIK). You could also potentially even transport the fuel (not sure how the losses look on that though since energy/weight is not very high; maybe ships or trains could still work though).
Drawback is that regenerating the iron powder needs (green) hydrogen and the cycle efficiency is low.
But this could be very helpful for countries like Germany, Poland or especially China to get dispatchable green power from former coal power stations.
I used them while designing my system. Just checked the numbers again against last 365 days - 97.5% accurate. Previous check I did year ago - I think it was more like 99.9% accurate.
My 3 month old system is running about 20% above their numbers, not clear on where the difference is. From some other modeling using pvlib, I suspect that the panels are over producing, as that’s the easiest way to make the numbers work. It’s also possible that the measurements are miscalibrated, or we’ve just had weather that’s not in line with historical averages.
No, that's the Sichuan Basin. The climate is subtropical with monsoonal rain all summer and dry and cloudy winters. It basically has persistent cloud cover all year and heavy fog. Less than 30 days of sun per year.
The thing that bit me was the default tilt and losses. GSA's PVOUT number assumes optimal angle, so my east-west roof came in around 12% under what the map suggested. Their per-site PDF report is worth pulling, the monthly breakdown shows winter output way better than the headline map implies.
Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.
If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.
Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.
Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.
Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.
Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.
Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.
In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.