Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
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.
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.
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
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.
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It’s been great traveling the world and seeing more and more solar installations. There is a long tail for things like aviation and plenty of chemistry but the world is changing. It would be nice if less governments were voted in that were anti the transition but progress is still being made
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie’s where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It’s a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are “counted” different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn’t even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
“very long time” here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it’ll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we’re putting biofuel on a truck, it’s worth considering. I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we’re making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there’s no incentive to switch.
I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
Oh yeah, it’s inefficient as hell. But energy from the sun is coming to us whether we harvest it or not. It’s unlimited. The limitation is solar cells.
We’re at the point where we’ve basically run out of easy oil to access, and we’re coming up with bigger and deeper drilling methods. We spend billions on a single offshore rig that will function for 10-20 years at most.
The issue isn’t efficiency, it’s profit motive.
We have fuel tanker trucks and rail cars already. Could we not run a similar arrangement with batteries on a truck or train car?
Batteries carry a lot less energy per kilogram, so transporting them uses more energy than transporting biofuels. You also have to carry empty batteries back to the source rather than it being a one way trip. It could be feasible on rails, but those are two major limitations compared to just running some big cables over land. The weight problem also means that some amount of combustible fuel will always be necessary, since batteries and aviation are not compatible.
Hence why we should work towards vehicles like The Cyclops with power outlets
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it’s paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there’s ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We’re going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there’d be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I’m sure there could be countries already doing it - I’m advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there’s crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I’ve contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I’m contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that’s just the one I’m using.
Or you could just do ground mount arrays somewhere because it’s way cheaper to install and who cares about a 1% or whatever change in land usage.
Depends on the location. Around me, they’re sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I’ll agree with you. Here in Europe, there’s not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most “unused” land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I’d much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that’s biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
You don’t need unused land you just need to displace agriculture. If you have any land used for cattle grazing for example you can have enough grass to feed 1 cow or you can have enough solar to power 20-40 homes. Pretty obvious to me which is the more productive land usage there.
Legislation for car parks is a great start. Korea just did some
What they’re saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.
This, of course, doesn’t take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.
Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.
Their right, in the sense of square acres.
Get ready for a rant.
Except it doesn’t work that way and it isn’t that simple, the article pokes a big hole in its own argument in the second sentence, the world, it’s spread out across the world. The crop land used for biofuel is hundreds or thousands of miles way from where the electricity would need to get to. The farmers would have nothing to farm and they would have to give up or lease their land to electric companies or the government. The entire infrastructure for utilities and farming would need to be torn down and rebuilt, it wouldn’t be practical for at least 2 generations once construction started, in that time we could be using a completely different form of fuel making solar obsolete.
The problem isn’t where to put panels but how to get electricity to the electric cars that are thousands of miles away from the farms and the farms are many miles from each other. Plus biofuels will never go away and we’ll need significant quantities for at least another hundred years.
Use old landfills or old quarries or building rooftops, their a lot closer to the cities. Why not use the windows of the buildings for thermal energy. Why not use the energy from our heating and cooling and plumbing systems to generate electricity. Plus we can do them all at the same time, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, put a windmill and solar panels and thermal on the same rooftop. Put steam turbines everywhere.
As another commentator points out, transportation of electricity and vehicles themselves are the major problems. Farmers that grow biofuels could conceivably shift to another crop, and many of the crops used for biofuels are routinely farmed for other uses (e.g., corn is animal feed and biofuel feed). In that regard, I disagree with the the argument that the entire infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.
the problem of getting electricity to cars is removed if we have better public transportation, though developing that infrastructure and reconfiguring the existing system (e.g., car-centric) is a much bigger problem. Regardless, you can still use solar for other uses (houses, industry) while you convert transportation slowly (and painfully, as we’ve really painted ourselves into a corner).
I do* like your take on alternate land uses for quarries (and mines! don’t forget those). Not all mines are close to cities, but some are. There’s a few really good example of mines installing solar panels on their reclaimed tailings storage facilities., or old mines being used for pumped hydro batteries.
The energy issue is multifaceted, and while it’s easy to say ‘just do nuclear’ ‘just do solar’ ‘just do hydro’, one size doesn’t fit all. However, the one thing that DOES fit, is how we have to start thinking about how to repurpose what we have already (e.g., windows as you point out) to suit our objectives of green energy.
Why? Because basic engineering will tell you that small areas of low quality waste heat isn’t something you turn into usable energy.
That’s the one sentence out of thay post I didn’t agree with a well.
It’s almost as if @kboos1@lemmy.world doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about and is saying complete nonsense.
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…
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.
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
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
