I'm no expert in this topic but would like to hear from you if you are. Its year 2010, everyone's worried we're running out of oil so why haven't we seen solar energy factories dotting our landscape?

Solar heat is probably our biggest source of free energy as a tropical country. The heat is unbearable. Isn't it possible, at the minimum, to use that heat to turn water to steam, use that steam to turn a motor that charges a large battery, and use that battery to run light bulbs and fans?

What are the issues that are preventing such a thing?

issues....:
1. large start up cost
2. unstable power supply
3. energy storage problem
4. efficiency issue

Start up cost
How much more expensive is it than setting up a regular diesel-powered station? Or is the real issue return on investment?

Unstable power supply
Yes, foreseeable if bad weather or 4 seasons... but isn't tropical weather is predictable and the heat pretty much uniform all year round?

Energy storage problem
Is it any different than storing wind power energy which is big in Europe and soon, China?

Efficiency issue
If its loss due to conversion from heat to electricity, how high is it compared with burning diesel to run steam turbines to generate electricity?

I am also not an expert. I just hope some expert could give some ideas. If the entire roof is made of solar cells would that be sufficient to 1) light up you house, 2) Refridgerate your food 24 hours daily 3)give power to TV and PC from 19:00-23:59 4) Provide hot water shower for typical family of 4 people 5) Power air cond while you sleep.

much higher....since the technology for it is new....hence the materials for it is expensive since there's no large scale production of it...
also, investors are more willing to put their money on more proven systems than a relatively new system


nope.....the sun still don't shine at night... also there's cloudy days....rain all leading to unstable power supply and hence it is hard to calculate how many solar power stations are needed to power a certain industry or population.
unlike fossil fuel based you can increase or decrease output at will.

energy is not stored....it is just sent to the grid as it is produced.....
very bad if we cannot store energy and use a unstable power supply

no need to compare with fossil fuel based actually...
efficiency not high enough to balance the high startup cost and deliver cheap electricity at the same time.....hence the attractiveness of this system to investors is low



attractiveness will increase when the fossil fuel price increase and government incentive is given to develop it.

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Added on May 19, 2010, 3:16 pmthat's some seriously high power demand you are talking about..... efficiency and storage issues apply here.....most likely you will need more power from external sources...

but...no doubt that installing that could lower the electricity bills..... as for attractiveness to put solar cells on the roof...depends on how much time is needed to offset its initial cost and the mentality of the people and the cost of electricity per unit...

This post has been edited by slimey: May 19 2010, 03:16 PM

interesting discussion..

Interesting... I used to think it was a limitation of physics that made it impossible to develop the solar cell further based on current materials. Problems with the traditional photovoltaic model perhaps. I think something new is brewing in Australia on this.

On the issues, so far I can't see much difference from those experienced by wind power such as seasonality (wind sometimes stops blowing), storage, efficiency, set up cost. One wind turbine and its support subsystems are not cheap and because climate change is making wind patterns unpredictable, the risks of wrongly placing them is high.

Wind power is already mainstream in certain parts of the world so I wonder why its any less risky than the old photovoltaic solar panels? We don't know if the wind might stop blowing tomorrow but the sun will definitely come up for sure.

malaysia maybe more suitable for wind than solar with our long coastline, solar panel take over large area, australia and china can setup their solar farm in the desert while we need to clear forest to setup solar farm. they need to look at the wind pattern in malaysia and identify optimum area to setup wind farm, china have been setting up wind farm at breakneck speed, so we can by the tech and consultation from there.

either solar or wind we still need a better grid system to transfer the energy more efficiently and balance the load.

as for energy storage, a simple but not very efficient way can be found in dam australia where during night time where energy use is low, the extra power is use to pump power into the dam's lake and during peak our the water are released to generate extra energy

This post has been edited by robertngo: May 19 2010, 05:19 PM

there are 2 ways of obtaining power from solar, the most common is photovoltaic where you convert light into electric. at current technologies, efficiency is low, and you need a large land area, with high initial costs. cost of generating power this way is around 3-4times the cost for fossil fuel plants.

the second method is to covert heat from the sun to electric by heating up steam and running turbines. there are already several power plants in the world using this method, but again, cost and outputs are an issue. typical plants of this type is around 10-20MW region. (in comparison, fossil fuel plants operate at 100MW-500MW per machine)

If one diesel plant produces the power of 10 solar plants, won't it still make economic sense for each town to be served by its own 1-2 solar power plants? Sure there's a setup cost to solar but won't it be mitigated by lower running cost? Diesel plants must top up their tank every day. Solar plants escape this cost.

Oil money. Fiat money. Fractional reserve banking.



You can't just switchover without causing damage to certain industries and power whose interests rely on oil backed currencies.

This post has been edited by garytong: May 20 2010, 04:52 PM

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/SecondPage.html

Search for "Example #3" and start from there. It might help.

This post has been edited by VMSmith: May 20 2010, 05:49 PM

Dude, thx for the link. This is what it referred to:



Some critique:

It is like saying the amount of rice eaten in Africa in one month barely rivals the amount of rice eaten by 2 towns in China. While it may be factual, it doesn't necessarily mean Chinese towns have superior eating habits. It may mean that there's not enough rice to go around in Africa. Invalid comparison.


No indication if the "real world" includes installations in the tropics or just those in the northern hemisphere where sunlight duration and intensity is seasonal. This is one problem I often find in US publications. When the world in "World Series Baseball" is defined as all the US states between Florida and Michigan, you start to take their version of "real world" with a pinch of salt.


The figure of 20% is questionable if the data is derived from northern hemisphere pv installations and furthermore, "all the pv installations in the world" may be an irrelevant figure, like the rice consumed in Africa thing.

does not really matter actually..... you can output as much as you want as long as you build them as big as you need it...

let's assume we have 1 coal fired plant and 1 solar plant of equal size..... the coal power plant will win easily in competition of power output....

no point talking about efficiency when there's no stability.... kinda like counting one's heart rate when the heart rate is not stable....
the sun does not shine at night....that is a fact....
now unless we develop a reliable method of storing excess energy while there is sunlight in the day time then you will have no power at night.
chances are you'll still be seeing coal fired plants around to provide that stable energy which is required...
no doubt that building solar power plant will reduce the need for power from fossil based sources.....
but if we build these 2 systems together it is very hard to estimate the proper ratio of fossil fuel based energy to alternative energy
thus leading to big wastage of funds.....just to create that extra "safety zone" of energy output...

country developers don't like that........ try putting yourself in their shoes and weight all the options available to them.... and get your conclusion yourself

of course, you can always complement solar with hydro, wind, geothermal, biomass, wave, tidal, osmosis, nuclear etc plants.

none of this is viable to replace fossil fuel, together the reliance on fossil fuel is much lower

Yes at our present consumption rates, nothing less than fossil fuels is viable apart from nuclear. Our lifestyle's so tightly wound around fossil fuels a 10% drop in energy supply will be drastic, a 40% drop catastrophic. Given the numbers, I can't see any other way for alternative fuels to be viable except to reduce consumption i.e. a drastic change in lifestyle. In other words, over our dead bodies.

if you build solar farm you need to build another power plant to provided power when sun is not up.

the most viable way is to tap our hydro capacity as much as possible, build nuke plant to replace coal and diesel plant and complement with solar and wind farm, a new smart grid will help with delivering the power more more efficiently.

If you look at it that way. The way I see it, it's mostly to show how (relatively) economical it is to implement solar power as opposed to coal. Coal is cheap to invest in, which is why there's so many of them around. Solar is not.

I do agree it's an invalid comparison in the sense that the whole world could have built just one solar panel (never mind the cost), and it would still be "all the pv installations in the world". I didn't manage to drag up the numbers on how much solar power is generated world-wide, though.

Now that is just semantics. There's at least two reasons they named it "World Series Baseball":

From wikipedia:
The series were promoted and referred to as the "The Championship of the United States","World's Championship Series", or "World's Series" for short. As baseball outside of North America was not equal to that of North America at the time, the winners of the championships were by default the best baseball team in the world.

From wikianswers:
The MLB is the most prestigious league to play baseball. It is filled with the best players from all over the world from Asia, United States, Dominican Republic, and many other countries. Mlb scouts search for the best players around the world and offer them large contracts to join the club. When the playoffs are at the end there is nobody left except for two teams. This is called the world series because all that is left are two teams filled with the very best players form all over the world.

I find it strange that you'd base the meaning of "real world" off from World Series Baseball. I could just as well have the same issues with Buffalo Wings (which aren't wings and don't come from buffaloes) or Mountain Oysters (which DEFINITELY aren't oysters and don't come from a mountain).

Sure, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net is based in the US, so "real world" would have more of a US-based context. But that doesn't mean tha's a reason to doubt EVERY single definition of that word that is released from a US source. At least, not until we know its context.

But hey, English is a strange language. Waiting will have to be filled before it can be grokked in fullness.

ANYWAY, BACK TO THE MAIN ISSUE... (apologies for detracting)


True that.

This is from wikipedia again:
For the weather and latitudes of the United States and Europe, typical insolation ranges from 4kWh/m²/day in northern climes to 6.5 kWh/m²/day in the sunniest regions.
In the Sahara desert, with less cloud cover and a better solar angle, one can obtain closer to 8.3 kWh/m²/day.

There's no doubt that solar power would work better on the equator than anywhere else. If the 4 and 6.5 figures are based of the 20% efficiency mark, then 8.3 is slightly more than double that of 4 (which makes it about 40% efficiency) and about 33% more efficient than 6.5 (too lazy to figure that one out).

I'd wager our country would have somewhere between that 6.5 and 8.3 number range due to more... humane weather conditions.

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Added on May 21, 2010, 4:25 amWhich is why I believe the world will not end with a whimper, but with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This post has been edited by VMSmith: May 21 2010, 04:25 AM

OMG, buffalo wings didn't come from a buffalo? Hahaha... kidding.

Semantics... I dunno dude, I see it more as misrepresentation, much like how Miss Universe is not really Miss Universe since they didn't invite that 12-legged beauty from Planet Zorgorn. While it may not be significant in sports (an American swinging a bat isn't much different than a Dominican swinging a bat) there's a huge difference between kWh/m²/day measured in solars panels located in Costa Rica and Poughkeepsie New York. While baseball teams may find it hard to find a baseball pitcher in Costa Rica, researchers won't have any problem pitching up a pv panel there so its really apples and oranges. If the data is what I suspect it is, they should have just called it for what it is - North American figures instead of "world" figures. You'll appreciate the margin of error when u use their conclusions to benchmark numbers you collect from the equator.

Oh, I don't doubt every single definition of the word from all US sources because many are legit. Its just that after having seen a few of these 'scientific generalizations' in the peer review basket, I learnt not to conclude until I see the actual data. So until I see it, I treat it (and any other study from other countries) with skepticism.



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 21 2010, 10:07 AM

Trust me, DON'T try the Mountain Oysters!!!

I don't doubt that either. I had a problem finding hard numbers regarding alternate energy sources online. So either no one has judged it important enough to research/collate the information regarding the differences in geographical location, it's not public information, or I'm just doing it wrong. The best I could do was that wikipedia entry with the 8.5 kWh number.