I don't think most solar & wind maximalists realize how little of the world is both optimal for solar panels AND located near a urban centre.
Having solar in the middle of the Sahara is utterly worthless because transmission makes it comically inefficient (beyond how inefficient solar is to begin with), and then you take another inefficiency tax storing it in batteries. Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas. Who knew humanity doesn't like living where the sun is baking them 18 hrs / day year round?
If only there were a very efficient, clean, and geographically-independent source of energy we could use that didn't depend on the weather or sun, and could be placed trivially near urban centres.
Like 90-95% of the world population lives at latitudes that get better solar resource than Northern Europe, such as Germany and most of the UK, etc.
The seasonality isn’t that great and you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars for my household of five.
And with tandem Si-perovskite cells commercialized over the next couple decades, etc, that amount could climb to ~20-30kW for the same roof, taking care of seasonality effects, etc, except at very high latitudes.
I love nuclear, too, but if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs, I don’t want any part of that.
> if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs
If this is the level of your discourse, why would you expect people to take your claims seriously?
> 15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars
You are aware that solar panels do not work at night? I.e. the time during which you would be most likely to heat your home and charge your car?
I mean, storing the solar in Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries in bulk only add a few cents to the cost of electricity. I even mentioned it earlier in my post, which you ignored:
> …you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
But no point in doing that while solar penetration is low, which it still is in my area.
As far as level of discourse, yeah, that’s precisely my point. Claims like this are so far from true for the vast majority of the world that it lowers the level of discourse to misinformation and slander:
> … Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas.
We are counting the specific efficiency of the solar panel now to malign solar? And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible?
The proof is in the pudding. Even with all the structural headwind, people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power. Who is going to give you the $15B+ it takes to build your nuclear power plant that needs to run 50+ years when that's what is possible today? That's why no one is building them anymore - it's not plausibly ever going to make money.
> And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible
Why are you swearing - are you upset about this?
It's 0kW/m^2 at night.
> people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power
The key here is "majority". The remaining 20% or whatever is disproportionately expensive, and people who are using solar while connected to the grid are externalizing the vast majority of the negative costs of using solar to other grid participants.
If you need to generate 100% of your energy using solar, you need to significantly over-allocate and spend a huge amount on batteries. People who generate "most" of their power using solar would need to spend multiple times as much to go to 100% solar, so A) the approach doesn't scale and B) they're imposing a much higher marginal cost on the grid per joule consumed than a "normal" customer.
They will get more and more efficient. Now imagine someone saying Apple I / personal computers are close to useless because they are inefficient and only IBM datacenters can run serious programs and solve real world problems.
I don't think most solar & wind maximalists realize how little of the world is both optimal for solar panels AND located near a urban centre.
Having solar in the middle of the Sahara is utterly worthless because transmission makes it comically inefficient (beyond how inefficient solar is to begin with), and then you take another inefficiency tax storing it in batteries. Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas. Who knew humanity doesn't like living where the sun is baking them 18 hrs / day year round?
See: https://zeihan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/globalsolarpot...
And it's about as bad with wind.
If only there were a very efficient, clean, and geographically-independent source of energy we could use that didn't depend on the weather or sun, and could be placed trivially near urban centres.