It’s a big area you can set up wind farms in, while property ownership in the eastern US is typically in the form of lots of small parcels, making it difficult to accumulate enough contiguous land for a large wind farm
Also the turbines can be much larger. The blades have to be a single piece, to withstand the forces on it. That obviously causes problems transporting them on land. Modern offshore wind turbine blades are single pieces of over 100m, so longer then a football pitch. However that is not a problem offshore. The reason you want it is that with blade length the energy produced grows exponentially.
Pretty pictures, but the standard reminders for putting solar in stupid places weren’t addressed, and still apply:
Solar panel manufacturing, financing, and installation remain the bottlenecks. We therefore need to make the most of every panel/kW installed, not just install more.
Panels therefore need to be installed where they get the maximum sunlight possible: no shade, up high, facing mostly upwards with preferably a slight tilt towards the equator. Vertical is bad unless you’re in the arctic.
There remains no shortage of uncovered roofspace. A given m² of panel is going to produce much more energy on a half decent roof than anywhere else except a tracking array.
Even if you somehow manage to run out of roof, building more roof (e.g. covering parking lots) is going to be better in every way than trying to squeeze the panels into other stupid places.
Very dense areas full of skyscrapers don’t really have parking lots - but the windows aren’t really going to do any better; they’ll be shaded 75% of the time. We want windows on large buildings to be shaded; it decreases solar heat gain and therefore aircon loads.
This is a cool idea, hopefully it can scale up. Could it be used for large scale carbon removal? How does it compare to current carbon removal methods?
I think the assumption is that since they are large and but the first most cost efficient, it doesn’t make sense to increase its share. Why not just put more solar instead?
I see from this paper that compared with Way et al. (2022), they introduced “learning in operational costs, rather than only in CAPEX”, which benefits solar and offshore wind, also “solar power and wind energy see a higher learning rate than previous model versions”. So very surprised wind not gaining more.
It is difficult to compare the results of Way et al. (2022) and this paper directly since in the former final and usable energy were reported and here it is electricity that is reported in the text, although from their relative share (both across time and wind vs solar at a given time), the conditions for solar is probably more favorable and wind growth is more constrained in this paper.
(Note: if I recalled correctly, Way et al. were the first to develop this system dynamics model that made learning rates endogenous feedback processes.)
I think it is also ok to accept that cities won’t produce all that they consume. They need to import food, water, makes sense that they import energy too.
Lack of batteries hasn’t really been a barrier; people generally sell excess power generated back to their utility during the day and use electricity from their utility at night.
Terms are almost always that the rate you get paid for generation is less than what you pay to have electricity delivered though
Ah, I’d had this impression from other conversations that batteries were half the cost of getting into solar, but perhaps that was for going off grid altogether (in which case I’d imagine the power company would want their battery back)
Yeah, if you want to go fully off-grid, it’s a lot more expensive; you need enough batteries to store full overnight power, and you need enough solar panels to charge them on a cloudy day in winter. It’s cheaper to do an on-grid system where you generate as much electricity as you use over the course of a year, which is a lot more common.
This would be nice because during bad winter storms the power can go out for days. Not really in town, but if you live in more rural areas it can be an issue.
Interesting, as a Vermonter this is the first I’ve heard of this proposal, and I’m pleasantly surprised with GMP’s plan. I live somewhat out in the boonies, and experience power outages at least a few times every year, sometimes lasting a couple days, with one particularly bad winter storm leaving us without power for over a week (the old wood stove really came in handy then). I’d absolutely love to have a battery installed, if they ever offer it to me.
I think people do not realize that there is a huge bonus for the first country to unlock the “negative price energy peak” achievement.
There are some businesses that will only be possible in these conditions and they will flock to the first country with it. Generating hydrogen seems like the most straightforward one, but there are also bio-ethanol processes that require some energy to be profitable.
We see intermittency as a curse, but I think we overestimate the difficulty to adapt to an intermittent schedule and we underestimate the advantage of having time spans with free energy, especially when they happen during the day.
Yes, right now we don’t see this effect because the obvious thing to do is to sell it to your neighbor so they can temporarily shut down coal or gas plants. That effect will kick in when your neighbors can’t do that anymore (e.g. because they also switched to the same type of intermittent power) and there won’t be any easy way to cash out on additional electricity. We are not there yet.
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