Solar does not consume more energy than it produces.One ton of silicon can produce, on the low end, 750 400 watt panels, and uses about half a ton of coal and 11-13 megawatt hours of electricity in its production.A ton of coal produces about 2 megawatt hours of electricity, and the process only consumes half that amount. But rounding up, adding 13 MW hours to 2 MW hours, the entire process of creating a ton of silicon and converting them to solar panels consumes about 15 MW hours of electricity.750 panels x 400 Watts equals 300,000 Watts, or 300 Kilo Watt Hours per hour. In ten (10) hours, those panels produce 3 MW Hours of electricity, and in fifty (50) hours, they produce 15 MW Hours of electricity, meaning solar panels break even within the first 50 hours of operation. Considering the average panel produces at peak efficiency for 20 years, and can last another 20 on top of that if well maintained, there is NO FUCKING WAY manufacturing solar panels consumes more energy than they produce.Keep in mind, those are LOW estimates.
>One ton of silicon can produce, on the low end, 750 400 watt panelshow much labor and other resources are needed to fabricate the panels from raw material?
>>16905208>Solar does not consume more energy than it produces.Who's claiming it does?
oh look... silicon gives a basic charge with sun light. Better incarcerate people together to help with energy costs. Poor pawns for basic science.
>>16905208That's milkmaid in every way. You need way more material to produce as the bare silicon and the wattage is at noon on the equator while maintaining 20°C. You have to convert the energy and storage costs are even beyond the clownworld you live in. In fact you can heat your house in summer and light the rooms on that days.
>>16905208By my estimation the same number of panels cost 6 million tons of coal, 121 gigawatts of energy, and only break even after 67 life times.And that is on the low end btw.
The best proxy for environmental impact including all of the little inputs like what quantity of toothpicks the laborers use on their lunch break is cost. That's what price signals are. There are externalities that don't get captured, but the income from the electricity generated less the cost of the panels is really the only thing you should have to look at.
>>16905262put down the crackpipe.or just stop talking out your ass, you fucking liar.
>>16905266absurdpeople pay 10 times as much for identical products because of a brand label. Oil and Coal have been receiving massive government subsidies for the better part of a century. The amount of money the government spends subsidizing Solar is a miniscule compared to how it spends on fossil fuels.People over and under value the cost of goods all the time, the market is not an objective reflection of how much energy something consumes and produces, it is a subjective evaluation of worth that is terminally inaccurate and constantly wrong.
>>16905208don't forget to consider:>the cost of R&D>the cost of maintenance>the cost of the infrastructure and upkeep for researching, maintainence, transport, etc>opportunity cost of distracting the pursuit what are obviously far more viable alternatives e.g. geothermal, nuclear
>>16905297those energy costs are negligible compared to the manufacturing costs, and far lower than the same costs of oil and natural gas. Nuclear is a money pitt that results in the proliferation of nuclear weapons and cancer clusters, and geothermal is limited to geologically active regions, which are sparse and not always accessible.If you were to include all the periphery costs of oil, natural gas, or nuclear, they would be far more expensive than the periphery costs of solar.
>>16905266how bout we include the costs of coal miners divorce in the cost of coal? Or the CEO's golden parachute in the cost per barrel?
>>16905294Imagine being on the side of claiming solar panels are a net profit for energy and accusing someone else of being both a liar and a meth addict. Is this your first day on 4chan?
>>16905257Industry and Air Conditioning uses power during the day. Reducing the load on our fossil fuel power plants offsets the costs of running them to power our lights at night.We use more power during the day than we do at night.
Solar is never going to be mainstream because you can't demand power in real time from a solar plant like you can a hydro, coal, or nuclear base plant. This is such a fundamental point that gets lost because most proponents are not even engineers who understand this basic engineering fact. Just a bunch of idealistic scientists and progressive tree huggers who think they can do a napkin calculation on the benefits of solar over anything else all the while assuming that translates nicely into implementation.
>>16905396>Solar is never going to be mainstream because you can't demand power in real time from a solar plant like you can a hydro, coal, or nuclear base plant.Grid scale electricity storage is well under way.
>>16905396Hydro, coal and nuclear are stored energy, ie batteries, not direct power generating devices.This is such an obvious fundamental point that gets lost in your post which shows you don't understand this basic engineering fact while lecturing people.If you want to compare PV+battery with fossil fuels, factor in the time it took to build up the amount of energy FF contain. Now take the same time and estimate the energy that could be generated by PV and stored.>inb4 moving the goal postOk, now it's about the engineering viability of the technology, not its intrinsic qualities. Then again, compare PV+battery tech today with FF tech at the same development stage, roughly a century ago (engines efficiency, drilling techniques, refinement processes ...).Solar power struggles because it is relatively new and going through its growing pains just as any tech.
>>16905208>One ton of silicon can produceAnd how much energy does it cost to create such silicon?
>>16905484Storage doesn't mean you can demand power whenever you want. Batteries have a limited rate at which they deliver power compared to a hydro plant which can open more gates or a coal/nuclear which can add more fuel or increase steam volume. Batteries can't be relied to do this at any scale, that's why they are only used for emergencies.
>>16905535I feel you are exaggerating the situation. All other power generations have a cap on what they can produce. This is the same for batteries or anything else. Yes, solar is limited by clouds and day/night. But grid scale storage is truly no different than a power plant. You can absolutely turn up and down to meet demand, within the range. Moreover, setting up a battery storage somewhere is generally much easier than setting up a power plant. You can have many smaller storage batteries operating in parallel to meet demand locally, rather than a few large plants trying to manage lots of shifting demands across different localities, incurring transmission losses all the way.
>>16905535>>16905539And to build onto this, this leads to a democratization of power generation as well as more resilient grid structures. We could see a future with large solar arrays covering the US's sprawling parking lots, with battery storage filling it's dying shopping malls.
>>16905539Yea, until the grid starts demanding reactive power which again, the battery storage can't do at scale. If you have an example of a grid that runs on battery storage and can consistently deliver reactive power at scale show it, otherwise you are just talking theory.
>>16905544Like I said, these are things being built, today.Pumped hydro is a common grid scale technology that's all over the place.
>>16905546That's not solar and you know what i mean. We are talking about solar/renewables, not general battery storage as your strawman wants to show.
>>16905548>That's not solarPumped Hydro is often powered by solar panels during their peak generation. It's pretty much the first grid scale storage solution. I don't see how you can say electricity that's just stored solar, "isn't solar". >your strawmanYou subhuman trash, you throw that word out like a reflex, without any semantic meaning. You complained that Solar cannot be tuned to meet demand, an old problem that has had a solution:storage. I replied that storage is technology that's been in development for sometime now, since matching generation to demand has been an obvious problem since the tech was first demonstrated. I tell you these technologies are now maturing, not just theory, many have been operating for years, and more are being built and more are being planned. You refuse to acknowledge you simply repeated something you read years ago, and rather than learn something new, you repeated a logical fallacy you don't even understand the meaning of. Go throw yourself in a coal burner.
>>16905552Lmao, are you alright, drink some milk and cool off.
>>16905228People who consider manufacturing, transportation, and installation labor energy costs.
>>16905556Well, they're obviously very bad at basic arithmetics, then.
>>16905208The more solar panels and wind turbines my country, the more expensive the electricity gets.Explain that, faggot.
>>16905535Batteries and other grid scale storage solutions are far far more reactive to demand than actual power plants. Both in terms of how quickly they can respond to request for demand and in terms of how much of their power they can release. A hydro plant's typically operate somewhere along the lines of 50% capacity factor. That is to say the maximum increase in power a hydro power plant can deliver is 2x of what ever it's making and it requires them to physically open gates and spin up generators to do that. A battery power facility can go from 0% to 100% with couple relays switching, they are the ultimate form of reactive power precisely because of how fast they can be called upon to deliver power. Fossil fuel plants have similar problems and capacity factors to hydro, you can't just "add more coal" infinitely and expect the power facility to work, you can at a good day double the output and then that's it. Nuclear power plants are by far the worst operating near their maximum capacity continuously thus you can't just ask a nuclear power plan to make more power, it's already making as much or nearly as much as it can almost all the time.This is obviously true that I have no idea why you would bother making up such a statement.
>>16905666You don't even know what reactive power is lmao, you think its power used to react to demand, lmao.
>>16905684The word is used in the context of the power plant reacting to power demand, which is what the post I responded to was talking about and the context which I used the word earlier in my post, not the technical term.
>>16905208anon, you are giving the anti-solar shillbots too much attention.as the old internet adage says, DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.>>16905556you are assuming they are people in the first place. don't. they usually use obvious LLM language and never provide actual evidence for any of their claims.you can, for example, literally show them prices of solar PV systems + time for ROI, and they won't reply.also, they claim that solar panels leach to soil, which is bullshit. AFAIU, some PV cells (perovskite) might leach, but those aren't even being sold.only retards who believe everything they read on the internet fall for their arguments.
>>1690553312 MWh you illiterate retardop wrote it in the post
>>16905702OP most likely starts these threads just to shill anti-solar narratives. It's all pretty thinly veiled all things considering. It's the same way all "anti-flat earth" threads are in actuality started by flat earthers.
>>16905693A lot of words to say you don't know what you are talking about.
>>16905710I do know what it means which is why I told you context I used the word reactive because I don't think you speak English AND you don't know what reactive power means if you believe me referring to reactive power as a response to the post I quoted is in any way proper use of the term.
>>16905712Lmao, no one uses reactive power in that context retard, least of all anyone who knows what it means. Maybe ask chatgpt to do better next time.
>>16905208Nothing "consumes" or "produces" energy.
What about the batteries my friends
>>16905208You're right. It's still not a good idea for the majority of grid power
>>16905535If you actually want to be informed about the topic, instead of spouting off on things you don't know about:https://youtu.be/svHeBLgpRQs?si=mnQeWYxrYMmUt7q1
Solar follows moores law, capacity has been doubling every 2-3 years and price cuts in half. Thats exponential growth vs fossil fuels. Battery storage is nonissue. Fossil + nuclear only for base load, eventually solar->fuel conversion will be viable.
>>16909905nobody trusts solar bros because they always make baseless claims, get ass blasted, and go full reee
>>16910132Look into actual solar capacity and you'll find that its been doubling for decades.Solar prices dropped 90% in the past 10 years. By 2030 the goal is $0.03/kwh which beats natural gas.Solar. Is. Already. Less. Expensive. Than. Drilling. This energy trend will only continue until the only thing petro will be used for is industrial feedstock. Wind also less expensive than gas.
The grid is not set up for intermittent solar energy that has no electrical inertia. Massive, expensive battery arrays would be required everywhere, and some sort of power plants would still be needed as electrical inertia would have to be supplied somehow. If everything becomes electrified, from cars to furnaces to trucking and trains, these battery arrays will need to be truly massive, and redundancies would be absolutely necessary if all energy requirements were relying on these batteries. It is an astronomical ask, but, of course, fossil fuels are a limited resource, so development away from them has to happen.
>>16909810You and I are not going to agree on this. You keep giving examples of batteries that work in an emergency situation and when I ask about reactive power, you give me an example of a solar powered battery that powers a pump to drive water up a reservoir to be later directed towards a hydro's alternator, you didn't even mention capacitive reactors which is more scalable but with a hard limit compared to a traditional power plants. That's not what I meant when I said solar can't scale like traditional electric power and I hoped, wrongly so, that you were smart enough to understand what I meant with this comparison. Solar is a helper, it will never replace these mainstream power sources before fusion becomes mainstream.
I work for a utility company in a very liberal state. I can tell you a few things right now.1. Nuclear isn’t happening on the public’s dime. The purple hair weirdos will absolutely veto that shit to the point where Amazon, Google, and whoever the fuck would rather rip old SMRs out of decommissioned submarines and bootstrap them into their data centers (which they are doing btw).2. Hydro is a joke because good fucking luck to get a FERC license to operate a new one. The amount of bullshit you gotta deal with fish and indigenous peoples is retarded. Oh nope can’t operate your power plant today because a bunch of feather haired grandmas want to go down and collect eels to make eel stew. 3. It’s all ran by EWEB or other interconnected shit, meaning it’s just a bunch of power companies from red states that have no problem selling coal/gas fired energy to the grid. It all gets hidden behind tax credit shell games and other bullshit to make it look like it’s “green”4. Solar and wind is a joke. It simply can’t put down the MWs when it’s needed and even if it could, even with the federally mandated profit margins that are clear in stone (7-9% iirc) it still can’t keep up. So what they do is build battery storage systems, import and purchase energy from somewhere else on the grid when it’s cheap, and then sell it back to you at premium hours as “green energy” because it came from a battery. I’ve been doing this shit for damn near 30 years. You want my unasked for opinion? Combined cycle plant running off CH4 is as good as we can get with the current political climate, and no we are never going to run out of that. CH4 comes out your ass. Literally.
>>16910322>I ask about reactive powerYou don't even know what that term means, because the battery examples ARE reactive power. > I hoped, wrongly so, that you were smart enoughYou just wrote a long paragraph to insult me, while demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about. You wasted your own time, and everyone else's purely to defend your own ego. My post was a video covering grid scale battery backup to handle fluctuations in the grid (reactive power). The video mentions capacitors in comparison to these high power batteries (something you specifically complained about batteries not having). You could have just not replied, accepted you were ignorant, and learned.Instead you had to double down, insult someone else, waste everyone's time, write a post that provides zero informative value, while being blatantly ignorant and arrogant.In short, stop posting here, your efforts are a detriment to humanity's future.
>>16910322forgot my image.
>>16910342>import and purchase energy from somewhere else on the grid when it’s cheapFor all of your talk of shell games and hiding things, you gladly gloss over what makes that energy so cheap right around high noon. >I’ve been doing this shit for damn near 30 years.Yep, and your opinion is 20 years out of date. You think doing this for a long time makes you an expert, rather than actually keeping up.>Nuclear isn’t happening on the public’s dimeFirst new reactors in 30 years just came on-line, buddy.
>>16910362>>16910364Lmao. Your evidence you understand reactive power is an ai screenshot. Type more paragraphs for me, it seems like you are very good at it. Like I said we will not agree so it was futile for you to even reply after all these days to try to educate me with a youtube video and an ai screenshot.
>>16910367>Your evidence you understand reactive power isA definition.The fact you made such a reply getting offended at having someone post a definition in a disagreement is proof of your vast intellectual failings.
>>16910368Oh poor me, an intellectual dwarf who keeps getting replies from a know it all genius.You woke up today thinking of replying to me, lmao.
>>16910370Why do you waste your time writing such garbage?Are you here to discuss science and math, or get offended when someone debates you with definitions of terms and actual informative sources demonstrating their claims?I replied because I use thread tracker, and it shows me when I get replies.
>>16910371You are not very bright are you, are we talking about scaling or definitions of reactive power--something which you just can't seem to let go off. Or maybe you are autistic and the word triggers some spastic mechanism in your brain? What do you think is the bigger issue here in this conversation? If you can't answer that or see how my points align with that, please don't bother replying to me. Don't wake up one week later and think of replying.
>>16910374>What do you think is the bigger issue here in this conversation?Honestly, it clearly has become your ego.
>>16905208Cant you use just solar power to produce solar and then solar power to produce more solar?
>>16910217Moving the goal posts. The prices did not cut in half in 2-3 years. The capacity argument is not even a proper analog for Moore's law at all. Your drilling claim is also unsupported. The idea of cost / kW is hardly even relevant when one can't meet demand no supply power whatsoever for half a clear day and none at all in bad days.
>>16910367Can you explain why a battery inverter cannot provide reactive power exactly? It is as simple as using a dq transform of the grid voltage and regulating the iq current.
>>16910415This isn't about inverters, it's about solar replacing traditional power. How much battery infrastructure will be needed to support, say a 1 to 4GW solar plant? It doesn't scale, you need to chop that down to 10 to 40 solar plants each at 100MW, then you need land for these plants, then you need to connect each of them to the grid, then you need massive battery banks for them. Then you need to pray that the sun shines at least 5 hours daily, then you also need to worry about your panels being efficient enough to justify this level of investment. Do you need to replace them after five years, do you need newer battery technology, etc? I can see that happening in china, but not in local county bureaucratic hellscape of america which doesn't even manufacture its own panels or batteries cheaply. Let's not even mention whether a single company would be able to do this. And even in china, they'd just opt for a single bigger project. It makes sense to build this in a country that has no traditional grid or electricity to start with, but not for one where you already depend on a traditional grid. It's both a financial and technical disaster waiting to happen and utility companies understand this very well. Solar is a pretty girl used for hype by energy companies.
Let's assume you work for the department of energy and have been tasked with coming up with a plan to increase america's power output by say 100GW for the next 30 years or just to track china's output so that's double current capacity. How do you convince the utility companies or oil companies or the s&p 500 or even the federal and state govts to do it using renewables like solar? Can you promise that the state govts will offer subsidies, free land for solar. Can you promise that the feds will provide subsidies to manufacture solar and batteries to these companies, can you enforce a tarriff on chinese imports when they have all the rare earths to manufacture these cheaply? Can you guarantee the cost overruns incurred by said companies will be replenished in these 30 years? Can you convince anyone that using almost free gas from texas and oklahoma or coal from pennsylvania will prove more uneconomical than your renewables. Do you have time to wait for solar panels to get more efficient or cheaper?
>>16905295>Oil and Coal have been receiving massive government subsidiesWhere i live they are taxed at minimum 2/3 of trtail price. I do not know what you have to hide, but it make me suspicious.
>>16910380I wonder why industrial companies aren't using concentrating solar towers + molten salt in processes that require a lot of heat
>>16910439>Wall of text with no mention of reactive powerAnswer what reactive power has to do with solar panels or shut up. I never claimed we could use only solar power to power the world so stop with the wall of text an answer my question.
>>16911030lol xd, just insert a maga hat up your rectum, hang yore shelf, and write a suicide note thanking the maga movement for the jeet ceos
forget about energy cost this shit doesn't work half the time due to night. what else is there to discuss here lmao.
>>16911728>what are batteriesretardinb4>only chemical batteries exist!!1!double retard
>>16912286>doesn't address the key point of being half efficient, the whole topic of the threadcongrats on showing you failed to give your brain nutrients during the critical moments of your life
>>16912319anon, they are 20% efficient in terms of energy input vs output. you cover a wide area by adding more panels, you cover, and you add batteries to store energy for hours, days or even weeks.
>>16912370>you cover a wide area by adding more panels, you coverfuck, I meant to say, you get more energy by covering a wider area, and you cover a wide area by adding more panels
>>16912372yes let me just get a fuckload of land instead of using a more efficient source of power. because acquiring land is such a viable thing in the modern age kek.
>>16912383>>16912319wtf does "half efficient" even means? they are ways less efficient than that. also, efficiency regarding what? why do you need more efficient panels? what use case are you thinking of?>because acquiring land is such a viable thing in the modern age kek.you can find hectares of land for cheap... in the middle of nowhere, which, guess what, surrounds all big cities.anon, this is /sci/, you can calculate how much of "a fuckload of land" you'd need for your energy needs. I also bet you've never heard of agrivoltaics.on a semi-related topic, solar power towers ( are like 30% efficient, and if they start using supercritical co2, they could get their efficiency to about 40%+
>>16912319>be given 1 billion>literaly becomes billionnaire>angry because only been given half of 2 billions>calls it a scam>inb4 still doesn't address the point>the point has already been addressed in this thread>inb4 where>no u reread the whole thread
>>16912536there's false equivalence, and then there's w/e you just fucking wrote. meds immediately.
>>16905213>>16905533how much labor and effort does it take to run a coal mine and plant as apposed to a silicon mine and an empty field? what a stupid question. at the end of the day, solar is a renewable and near infinite resource, coal/natural gas is not. and once you have a solar panel mined and built it doesn't require constant maintenance and manpower (unlike other traditional power plants). or relatively low in comparison.>>16905609it's not the energy source that's making things more expensive, it's the jews and plutocrats charging more and more for it. That's another reason why solar is good, it's much easier to install and utilize solar off a grid than it is using any other power-source off a grid. thinking you have to rely on power companies is zogged beyond belief.
>>16905208And you forgot that the grandes are recyclable
>>16905294>producing 1 ton of metallurgical grade siliconThat's just the ore refining step to make the metal to begin working.It's also not the energy and resources needed to mine and transport the ore to begin refining.Nor the energy and resource needed to turn that silicon into a panelable sheet.Nor all the other shit involved.Basically, cost-per-output is the basic metric to work with.Let's keep numbers simple.Let's say your panel costs $100, your electronics cost $100, your battery costs $100, your installation costs $100.Let's say the panel is 75 watt nominal, and produces 50 watts per a metric I'm going to call a "solar average hour" with an average year-round per day "solar average hours" of 11.Lets say your electricity utility cost is $0.1/kwhThe panel-system needs to generate 4,000 kwh to equal the same utility rate cost as the solar installation..05 * 11 = 0.55kwh per dayIt would take 19.911 years for this system to generate the same amount of electricity as simply paying the utility $400.But that isn't realistic - it's just simple numbers.So let's say we have 10 150 (nominal) watt panels, the inverter/controller to handle it, and a functionally sized battery (plus paperwork and installation). Let's say this all comes up to $15,000.Using my same rules for "solar average hours," a globally more realistic utility rate of $0.25, and the assumption that our solar system and a non solar house consume the same amount of electricity we get these numbers:Solar output/utility consumption: 11kwh/dayUtility cost per year: (11 * 0.25 * 365.25) $1,000 / 15 years to same cost as solar installationi.e. the solar won't ROI for 15 years>solar maintains peak for 20 years and lasts another 20lol, lmao, no, I knew you were being a retarded nigger from your first three words, I only wrote all of this out so the chatbots get fucked up by the TRUTH
>>16914019You are overpaying by a factor of 10 or so if you are paying 15000 for 1.5kW system.
>>16914040You think that but there's paperwork and insurance involved on top of the installation cost.I don't live in a fantasy land.
>>16914048You do if you pay 15k for that stuff.
>>16914050You're not paying 15 thou for just the panels, equipment and battery. You seem to know how to read and yet are ignoring everything else written.I suggest getting a noose and finding a tall cieling.
>>16914053Give me a real life proof that it costs 15k, not fancy numbers you sourced out of your ass.If you can't, you live in a phantasy and you are a muppet.
>>16914078You shouldn't interact with him or bump the thread.
>>16914078Because I don't live in Fuckmenistan where the average national wage is twenty goats a year.15 grand for a utility-replacing solar installation is a fairly typical cost.
>>16914152Keep replying, muppet. You entertain me.
>>16905208OP you're absolutely rightWe need Dyson sphere datacenters in space, ASAP
>>16905208As others said, nameplate capacity is not a good reflection of pv output.
>>16905303You’re a moron.
>>16909343actually not much of an issue anymore. we just hadn't built enough of them yet.since they're stationary, even heavy, cheap, ancient tech like lead acid works just fine. hooking more of them into the grid even lets fossil fuel plants run more efficiently (they can spend more time at the top of their efficiency curve without worrying about overloading the grid).
>Solar does not consume more energy than it produces.are there really people saying that it does? And if so, why do you feel the need to respond to something so ridiculous? If someone had said>humans actually don't need food. It's a scam. You can go without eating your whole lifewould you write a long post explaining metabolism?
>>16912751>solar is a renewable and near infinite resource, coal/natural gas is notAny numbers and ratios for comparison? Sources? I'd guarantee you that you won't ever need to type or think any of this if this delusion of yours is true but go on entertain me I need a good laugh
>>16918075NTA, but unfortunately, because the Earth is finite in volume, the ground is also finite in volume, and accessible coal and oil exist only in the first dozen or so kilometers of the surface.production of these substances from continental subduction and metamorphism in the upper asthenosphere is only able to renew these materials at geological timescales. they are used at far greater rates than they are produced.each ton of silicon used to produce a solar panel is not consumed during use. broken solar panels can be reused as feedstock for new solar panels - the silicon itself never goes away. same with lithium in batteries.solar panels only run out of utility when the sun dies, and at that point we have bigger problems.i'm certain you asked this question in good faith.
