Results 61 to 86 of 86
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2019-01-21, 09:26 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2008
- Location
- New Zealand
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Germany still uses mostly coal power for electricity generation, and I think natural gas for home heating. Yes, renewables are climbing, but they have a long way to go.
Energy storage isn't free either. Using batteries, pumped hydro, or something else still means a large investment to build that storage. You need that storage because home energy use is highest when it is dark. I have seen some stuff about possibly storing solar energy by cracking water and combining that with air to make ammonia. Theoretically that can solve the transport and storage problem that hydrogen otherwise suffers from, so you can separate generation and consumption (in time and space) but that probably isn't close.
When it comes to rebuilding everything, that costs money as well, and concrete and steel both produce large amounts of CO₂.Last edited by Excession; 2019-01-21 at 09:30 PM.
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2019-01-21, 10:28 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Storing electricity for more than a few minutes leaks a lot of it, no matter how you do it. Unless you're using expensive high-performance batteries, we're talking about at least a third of it gone, either leaked or used to manage the system.
Rooftop solar in particular is generally less efficient in terms of environmental footprint than utility-scale solar. The main benefit is that the physical land footprint is recycled. A secondary benefit is saving a few percent on transmission losses if it's never pushed to the grid. The drawbacks include losing a lot of efficiency from being forced into a suboptimal angle relative to the sun, a larger infrastructure footprint from being more spread out, maintenance in particular being more difficult/dangerous, energy requirements for lifting things to the roof, and some extra difficulty with grid management.
Most places aren't particularly short on buildable spots that are close to the consumers and not far off the ground.The gnomes once had many mines, but now they have gnome ore.
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2019-01-21, 11:21 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I'm looking forward to the first major liquid ammonia pipeline spill near a major city after switching to an ammonia-hydrogen energy economy. That sounds like lots of fun.
That being said, I don't think it's a bad idea or that we shouldn't pursue it. I'm just pointing out that it seems like it'd need to be approached with lots of caution. Probably even more caution than compressed or liquid hydrogen storage and transport. Ammonia is nasty stuff.
Still, it's worth looking into, doing detailed cost benefit analyses, and revisiting after developing new future materials handling methods that might help with it.
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2019-01-22, 03:22 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Switzerland
- Gender
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2019-01-22, 04:34 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
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2019-01-22, 04:59 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Switzerland
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Oh, sure. I'm just saying. It's not all that easy to convert a pre-existing roof into a green space either, necessarily. Soil is heavy, so you might need reinforcements. And drainage.
That said, on a lot of angled roofs, solar water heating might be more interesting than solar panels, too.Last edited by Eldan; 2019-01-22 at 04:59 AM.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2019-01-22, 08:37 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2015
- Location
- Berlin
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I mentioned that one earlier. Without adequate storage and grid infrastructure, reducing energy consumption has more pressing needs than producing energy and feeding it into the grid.
The German government that originally started the "Green Energy Revolution" more or less had a good plan: Reduce consumption by enforcing higher insulation standards on buildings, as well as enforcing solar water heating as being mandatory, enforce e-mobility as a means to create a distributed storage network in form of cars and their batteries.
Well, they lasted 5 years and the follow-up government didn't have a clue how to proceed with the already started plan....
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2019-01-22, 11:02 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Another promising technology is chemical "heat storage" using solutions of sodium hydroxide or other ionic chemicals. It was mostly reported as being for "storing summer heat for use in winter" but on a smaller scale, it would be good for "home heat load-leveling" using a solar water heater type collector to evaporate the solution with excess heat during the day and releasing heat into the HVAC system at night.
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2019-01-24, 08:44 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2014
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
This, exactly. It's not like the steel that goes into making power plants of any description doesn't also need to be melted at rather high temperatures, and the only reason why energy inputs translate into CO2 emissions is because most of our existing power generation capacity is based on fossil fuels. If all our energy came from renewables, the CO2 emissions associated with manufacturing more renewable capacity (or manufacturing in general) would be close to zero.
Yeah, most of the actual casualties seem to have been caused by the panic to evacuate rather than any particular evidence for significant radiation exposure... following a natural disaster which already killed 15,000 people. Design flaws or no, the level of attendant hysteria was ridiculous.
Anyway, on the subject of energy storage, this might be worth looking at-
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-conc...-store-energy/Give directly to the extreme poor.
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2019-01-24, 10:07 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Switzerland
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
One other big problem with renewables (except hydro, which has its own problems) is consistency. In many places, you can not get consistent sunlight or wind, which plays absolute hell on the infrastructure.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2019-01-24, 10:40 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2011
- Location
- Sharangar's Revenge
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
That's really interesting. I wonder how it fares in earthquake-prone areas, though.
I read about molten metal batteries in Mechanical Engineering. The advantage with those is that you don't need to worry about anode/cathode degeneration. The disadvantage is that you need to keep the metal molten, so the batteries consume energy to maintain temperature. http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112. It's been a few years now, and I haven't heard of any further developments, though.Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
Thri-Kreen Ranger/Psionicist by me, based off of Rich's A Monster for Every Season
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2019-01-24, 11:44 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I don't think it's fast enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
TV pickup is a term used in the United Kingdom to refer to a phenomenon that affects electricity generation and transmission networks. It often occurs when a large number of people watch the same TV programmes while taking advantage of breaks in programming to use toilets and operate electrical appliances, thus causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption.
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The shortest lead-in times are on pumped storage reservoirs, such as the Dinorwig Power Station that has the fastest response time of any pumped storage station in the world at just 12 seconds to produce 1320 MW.[9] Once the longer term fossil fuel stations, which have response times around half an hour, and nuclear power stations, which can take even longer, come online then pumped storage stations can be turned off and the water returned to the reservoir.[9]The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-24, 01:01 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
- Location
- Quebec, Canada
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I saw this a few months ago, I wonder what you think about it. http://carbonengineering.com/ce-videos/
It feels like short term it might be part of the solution for more rural places where things like setting up the infrastructure for electric cars or things like that would be problematic as well as for things like airplane fuel or long-haul trucking where electric is probably never going to be viable (or even power generation in the arctic or something), and the carbon capture applications are pretty obvious for a carbon market or government funded carbon sequestration projects.
I'm just not sure it checks out and how well it would scale up.
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2019-01-24, 03:42 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
- Location
- The Land of Cleves
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Quoth Excession:
Energy storage isn't free either. Using batteries, pumped hydro, or something else still means a large investment to build that storage. You need that storage because home energy use is highest when it is dark.
Of course, the day-night cycle is predictable, and so it's easy to plan around that. More difficult is intermittent fluctuations due to clouds and such, and you still need some way of dealing with that. But even that might not need batteries or the equivalent: You can get a lot of flexibility out of smart metering and time-averaged loads. The idea is that some loads don't actually need a consistent power, as long as it's enough averaged out over some reasonable time interval, so the electric company continually varies the price of electricity based on production (i.e., cheap when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing), and those loads are connected to smart meters, so they know when it's cheap, and only turn on at those times. Air conditioning, for instance, is such a load, and is a major part of total usage in some areas (and it has the added advantage that the need is correlated with when the sun is shining).Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2019-01-24, 03:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Something that video didn't mention is using that captured carbon to make plastics. Burying it is all well and good for the feeling of doing something good, but what is needed is a carbon-negative process that produces profit.
Sure, some of the carbon in plastic makes it back into the atmosphere. But, say for argument that plastic sequesters 60% of the carbon that goes into it and perfect burying sequesters 100%. Well, 60% of 100 million tons driven by capitalism is a lot more than 100% of 5 million tons driven by ethics and feels.
You can also use polymer fibers to reinforce concrete. For long term high-volume projects like dams and properly built highways this is almost as good as burying carbon. By "properly built" I mean a road bed thicker than the depth of the frost line. That increases durability by quite a bit, and increases the volume used.
Also, current concrete production is notoriously carbon-intensive. Thus, converting concrete manufacture to use renewable energy inputs would go a long way, too.
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2019-01-24, 04:34 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2008
- Location
- New Zealand
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
You're right, I think what I was looking at was a graph of household energy use, not overall. There is still the duck curve problem, where solar delivers plenty during the day, but can't meet that household peak that at 7pm or so. The more pronounced that curve gets the better the business case for energy storage, but until you have enough storage you still need the traditional generation capacity to cover the peak.
Last edited by Excession; 2019-01-24 at 04:38 PM.
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2019-01-25, 10:37 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2009
- Location
- Canadia
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I didn't watch the videos, but from their website, it seems their initial plans are to convert the captured CO2 into a combustible fuel, so the process would basically be carbon-neutral at best (actually worse once you consider the entire life-cycle including construction, unless they are planning to sequester some of it to make up the balance). I agree that using it to make polymers or some other stable product would be a better solution, though the question is whether that is technically and/or economically feasible.
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2019-01-25, 11:08 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
In the video burying the captured carbon is mentioned as an option. They also say that the pilot plant runs entirely on renewables, so yes, the construction cost should be the main carbon emissions from the project. That would be amortized over the life of a plant, though.
And hey, using this technology you could power the construction machinery for every plant after the first with carbon neutral fuel. There are still probably many carbon-releasing manufacturing processes for needed off the shelf materials and components that would be outside the control of such a venture, though.
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2019-01-25, 11:35 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-25, 06:32 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
In temperate areas, seasonal variation is an even bigger difficulty. If you try to solve the problem of insufficient winter power by adding more solar panels that are only necessary when the days are shortest, you're massively overpaying for that power. Trying to solve the problem with storage means you're paying for a massive amount of storage capacity that's only discharged once per year.
Also, very few kinds of time-averaged loads would let you switch them off for several months.The gnomes once had many mines, but now they have gnome ore.
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2019-01-25, 07:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
That probably wouldn't be much of a problem for fiber reinforced concrete, since it's fairly alkaline. Likewise plastic building siding would probably still last longer than, say, wood siding does now. Which is to say a very long time.
The existence of common microorganisms that digest a type of material typically only matters in composting-like conditions.
PLA, the now-common corn-based biodegradable plastic, lasts quite a while outdoors in open air. If you compost it, however, it degrades about as fast as a very dense wood.
(Edit: the post originally said PVA, but that was a typo.)Last edited by gomipile; 2019-01-26 at 02:26 AM.
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2019-01-25, 11:25 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2013
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
IIRC, PVAs also dissolve in the wash. Hospitals use them for laundry bags so housekeeping staff don't come into contact with potentially contagious items.
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2019-01-26, 02:25 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
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2019-01-26, 08:53 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
- Location
- The Land of Cleves
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Quoth Bucky:
In temperate areas, seasonal variation is an even bigger difficulty. If you try to solve the problem of insufficient winter power by adding more solar panels that are only necessary when the days are shortest, you're massively overpaying for that power. Trying to solve the problem with storage means you're paying for a massive amount of storage capacity that's only discharged once per year.
Also, very few kinds of time-averaged loads would let you switch them off for several months.
I think it's an all too common mistake to try to find The Solution. Solar isn't The Solution. Nor is wind, nor nuclear, nor any single technology you can think of, because there is no one single solution. The solution is actually a combination of all of the solutions. Build more solar, where it makes sense. Build wind turbines, where they make sense. Increase efficiency everywhere we can. Increase flexibility via smart metering, to mitigate the unpredictability of wind and solar. If you happen to be in one of the few areas where tide power or geothermal is practical, use that too. Continue using fossil fuels where you absolutely must, but mitigate them as much as possible with carbon sequestration elsewhere. And so on.
Quoth halfeye:
If plastic is used for construction, when a plastic eating micro-organism comes along, buildings built using it will fall down. We need a plastic eating organism, there is too much waste plastic in the world, and more is coming by the second.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2019-01-26, 11:31 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Yeah, when winter gets cold, wind power is much better than solar, but less so in the summer (though that depends on the summer I suppose).
We'd actually be a lot better off if we were landfilling much more plastic. There's no shortage of landfill space, and won't be for a thousand years. It's purely a political problem, not a technical one. And plastic in a landfill is sequestered carbon. Much better for that plastic trash to be lying around where there's plenty of room for it, than for it to be eaten and turned into carbon dioxide, which we don't have room for.
However, the seas was what I was mainly talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_gyre
Pollution
Main articles: Great Pacific garbage patch, Indian Ocean garbage patch, and North Atlantic garbage patch
Ocean gyres are known to collect pollutants. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the central North Pacific Ocean is a gyre of marine debris particles and floating trash halfway between Hawaii and California, and extends over an indeterminate area of widely varying range depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define it. An estimated 80,000 metric tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces. 92% of the mass in the patch comes from objects larger than 0.5 centimeters.
A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic garbage patch. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer.The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-26, 07:47 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2006
- Gender
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
The main issue with plastic isn't that it isn't supposed to go to landfills, it is that it doesn't stay there. I'm not sure if any country actively puts trash in the ocean, though there are plenty of areas that don't do much to stop it from happening. Plastic bags for instance move very easily with wind, so that even if you're no anywhere near an ocean they might end up in a waterway and make their way to the ocean eventually. Or simply wash into the water way as they break down and are washed away as particulate.
The issue is that a paper straw that is thrown on the side of the road or dropped off a boat or breaks down in a landfill doesn't cause a problem like the plastic does. It is that people being people, aka not properly taking care of their trash, is less of an issue if something other than plastic is being used.