Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
Here’s a whole article on agrovoltaics. IIRC, they require less water because of the shade. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agrivoltaics-pairing-solar-power-and-agriculture-northwest
Archive because who knows what they’ll do next: https://archive.is/n4jF8
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
It’s not an inefficient way to turn political donations into federal subsidies though, and that’s the real point of it. It’s horribly inefficient, worse pollution, worse mileage, takes as much energy to make as they get from it, leads to overuse of chemicals that get everywhere, and raises food prices.
None of that matters a whit, because it turns donations to lawmakers into huge subsidies to agribusiness, the majority of which get claimed by the few remaining gatekeeping conglomerates in the agricultural sector.
You couldn’t come up with a less efficient form of solar power if you tried. It’s there to subsidize US farmers.
brazil produces more biofuel iirc
They’ve also cut down a lot of rain forests to do it.
no, the rainforests cut go majority to cattle ranching
Both statements can be true.
That may be. But as a percentage of farm income, the prices that corn (and soybeans to an extent) demands is driven by biofuel mandates within the US. If the only market was food and export, those prices would be substantially lower.
meaning what
Meaning that in the US biofuels are a very inefficient way of giving corn growers subsidies. That’s why congress has supported various biofuel requirements.
worry not brazil, also gives subsidies to the ethanol industry here, in part because we want to more independent of oil imports
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
“they were invited” german tour guide in family guy
While that is technically true, that is not the best use for that land, nor is it a good way to setup solar.
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Yes, we should continue to install solar, and the needed batteries or other storage methods. But, the future is fusion and geothermal. Geothermal development is making steady progress, in part by piggy backing on the fracking methods developed for oil. I expect geothermal to become widely adopted before fusion is ready. Or, at least it would be if people in power stopped ignoring it. It’s cheaper, and there are no big issues that we can’t see a clear path toward solving with current engineering knowledge.
The german article on the renewable energy transition ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende ) discusses this quite well. You don’t need any storage or other measures up to 30% electricity from solar and wind. This means, you just feed into the grid and nothing bad happens. Gas power plants would throttle their output automatically as they already do to match demand.
From 30% to 70% you can do simply with adaptive demand, i.e. making big industrial consumers run when there’s ample cheap electricity and throttle them when there’s not. No storage needed here either.
Seasonal storage is only needed for the last 30% of the renewable energy transition. Methods discussed today include synthetic fuels made from excess renewable energy when it is available. There’s already methods for chemical synthesis discussed in the literature. Let’s worry about it when we get to it.
The problem is geothermal is very limited by location and fusion is still decades away. We need both to contribute but one will always be an insignificant percentage and the other will be too late: we need to get carbon neutral faster than fusion can help us get there
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
when the sun doesn’t shines you are usually supposed to go to sleep
Gosh, I didnt realise I was supposed to be sleeping from 3pm until 9am in winter. Good to know
In Ireland that’s most days… 😉☘️
Is that why the guiness consumption is so high there? I never really thought of it as a sleep aid, but it is pretty drowsiness inducing.
there’s no need to have big industries that require a lot of power in ireland
It would probably use less water too. Crops require a lot of water, and biofuel crops more than most. I’ve heard it’s putting a massive drain on the available water in some places.
How about putting that farmland back to producing food, and covering all our rooftops and carparks with solar panels?
Its even more efficient. In Poland we have that project, where food is grown under solar panels - they harvest even more than before, because panels protect plants from too much sun.
I second this, if you design your solar panels well, not only do you get to outpu a lot of electricity, yiu actually increase your crop/cattle etc yield
Please. I used to live in RI and driving through ri and ma you will regularly see ACRE upon ACRE of woodland mowed down, flattened, and thousanda of gaudy panels put up in what was once public lands and wooded areas. They do this right outside of the Worcester city limits like they don’t have acre upon ACRE of already developed paved over areas that could benefit from shade from solar panels(think car parks, strap mall and dept store building roofs, residential roofs etc). I’m all for solar but I hate when they destroy nature for no reason. I’m not stupid I know it’s easier to build them on a level earth than on rooftops but we only have so much land available as it is why not be more efficient with the land we have already used?
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
And this whole thread ignores inclement weather. A few years ago Texas had 35MW of solar panels destroyed in minutes by hail. Hurricanes and tornadoes will do the same thing.
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
Fair point. It’s just the idea of using perfectly good farmland to fuel cars feels like a fucked up priority to me.
Hurricanes and Tornados can, and do, do the same to refineries too.
There is already an over production of food. We don’t need to grow more food.
I don’t know about that, but we certainly need to waste less food, and removing the profit motive from it’s production might help getting it to the people that need it but can’t get it. There are still people in the world starving needlessly.
We both grow more than we need, and throw more than we should away.
Some of that is a result of picky shoppers wanting unblemished produce. Some of that is a result of not having an
easyprofit motivated way of getting produce from where it’s grown to where it’s most desperately needed.We have tropical fruit available all year, but when impoverished peoples experience a crop failure, best we can do is send powdered milk.
Which incidentally may have cured them of lactose intolerance.
People are starving because capitalists would rather throw away perfectly good food and put bleach on it than give it to the starving to maximize their profits
Any idea how much it would cost?
Big part of the cost could probably be planned over like 20 years too.
At least I’m the US, those crops are heavily subsidized so they could subsidize solar instead…
LCoE is a partial metric at best, it tells you nothing about how useful the energy is produced. For comparison a nuclear bomb produces an LCoE of about ~30cents/kwh but that doesnt make it a good energy source to power a grid with.
When you are adding intermittent sources to a most despatchable grid, sure LCoE tells you most of what you need to know, as displaced more expensive sources just throttle down slightly. But once you get into significant fractions of energy (~1/3 or more) just having expected joules created / cost to build is not a particularly useful metric for an intermittent power generator.
I hope this is only to put things in perspectives because cars suck for a multitude of other reasons, however we power them.
We can use solar energy to move a box that weighs 1/2 tons around, for every individual on the planet. The cars will still shed microplastics. The cars will still require paved parking lots that are not permeable, worsening floods, and generate heat islands. The cars will still kill one or two billion animals every year. The cars will still kill about a million people worldwide every year; one every 30 seconds.
It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.
The size of Germany, Poland, Finland, or Italy
😄
First, pretty weird to go with 4 examples
Second, those 4 are of VASTLY different sizes by “my country isn’t one of the 5 largest in the world” standards. The difference in size between Germany and Italy is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
Third, even IF those countries were roughly the same size, they’re of such disparate shapes that the comparison would STILL be pretty much useless as a reference point to most people.
deleted by creator
is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
I chuckled. Weird comparison usage should be embraced! :D
Now do lithium mine externalities.
Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways.
Now do iron and aluminum mine externalities for ICE cars, which carry hundreds of pounds extra of those metals, plus much rarer cataysts like platinum and rubidium. The business community keeps quoting one white paper written by Volvo on this, but of course, no one actually read that paper because the authors saw fit to exclude the metals used in engines and transmissions in ICE cars when comparing to EVs. There is so much bullshit math on both sides of this argument, no one is realizing how we are getting distracted from major sources of pollution that continue unfettered like shipping, air travel and cement production.
ICE engines are mostly cast aluminum, which can be recycled trivially and indefinitely with renewable energy and no environmental harm.
Lithium batteries cannot be recycled without environmental harm.
Biofuels (due to inefficiency) are net negative emitters.
I’m all for electric, but this is, at best, a negation of the complaints that solar requires ‘too much space.’ In terms of an efficiency argument, this is not remotely appropriate, a girders to oranges comparison, if you will.
you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.
that and biofuels only land could produce the same as existing global electricity demand are bigger takeaways.
Article undersells the 7000twh of existing car+truck energy. With just 75% efficiency for solar panel to EV wheel, just 2366twh of solar would replace the ICE twh to wheel equivalent fuel consumption. So, the land conversion formula allows for 10x the number of cars and trucks. Even H2 electrolysis would permit 7x the number of cars and trucks (ensuring lighter trucks/cars as well) from biofuels land.
Saddly 75% is still a pipe dream, lucky to get 40% from panel to road. Not that biofuel is not one of if not the worst use of land mind you.
The DC-AC-DC conversion loop does cost 15% or so. LiFePo batteries (better than NMC) 10%, and motor 10-15%. AC grid transmission losses add more.
With home solar, DC charging (hopefully bidirectional), 75%-80% efficiency to the wheel. But sure, AC grid tied charging could drop it by 20%. Still better than 60% losses.
Comparing to ICE engines, its fair to exclude transmission losses (exists in both. about 5%), and there is regen available for EV, and it doesn’t idle. My original 75% claim may be too generous, but 3x efficiency of ICE is still fair.
Evs are 75% to 90% efficient from their battery, but the real issue is solar on the grid. Its way more then 20% loss from the grid, hell 40% loss in transmission is normal around here, and that’s just last run. The issue is that its loss on every step. I think local solar is the way to go for ev charging but this is clearly about mass deployment and that means the grid.
Oil refining uses an insane amount of energy.
An electric car could travel 60km (or more) on the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100km.
