US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1179

On March 05 2019 01:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Ideally you would indeed cut other programs entirely and replace the whole system with UBI.
If the state pays every citizen enough to live off of you don't need additional safety nets and those who want to earn more can work to do so.

But true UBI is pretty pie in the sky stuff at this point. Worth exploring but not ready for large scale implementation.

On March 05 2019 01:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Ideally you would indeed cut other programs entirely and replace the whole system with UBI.
If the state pays every citizen enough to live off of you don't need additional safety nets and those who want to earn more can work to do so.

But true UBI is pretty pie in the sky stuff at this point. Worth exploring but not ready for large scale implementation.

On March 03 2019 13:35 m4ini wrote:


Oof.

I have no doubt that this would be the answer that Trump would give, probably massively simplified, it'd be nonetheless wrong.

First, you don't use "solar panels" to create energy for a grid. Photovoltaic is what you put on your roof, but not in a power plant. There's multiple systems, but they all share one thing: the end result is steam. The most common way is, afaik, solar troughs. That's a big curved mirror with a pipe in the middle, through which runs water. The mirrors concentrate light onto that pipe, turn the water into steam, and use said steam to power turbines, which feed the grid. The second, more modern/radical approach is even better, because it also solves the "problem" of "huh, sun is off, muh phone empty". In that one, you have a big tower in the center (you've probably seen it in documentaries or something sciency already), mirrors around it. Those mirrors focus on a hole in the tower, with enough heat and focus to melt steel instantly. That beam is used to melt salt (around what, 600 degrees celsius roughly) - which runs then through a heat exchanger, creating superheated steam - and that runs, again, steam turbines.

Now, in regards to storage: you can absolutely store that molten salt, it'd lose roughly 0.5 degrees per day. So any salt molten at daylight, you can use to power the steam turbines at night as well. They are a bit clunkier than your average coal plant, admittedly - but you can build them in places where coalstuff etc doesn't make sense - in the desert. Preferably, even. So space really isn't that much of an issue.

Or, if pure storage is the goal, the US already has quite a lot of it too (i think 25 gigawatt or something just in water reservoirs). In something that's similar to a battery, just not in the sense that you're describing. In fact, every country that has nuclear reactors has to have big storage. Nuclear reactors (especially older ones) are not designed to be ramped up and down, or throttled. At night, when considerably less energy is consumed, there's a very real danger that nuclear powerplants would overload the grid, basically blowing it up. That's why at night, a lot of the generated energy is used to pump water into reservoirs (or turn thermal energy into potential energy, if you want), which then over the day create power through hydroelectric generators, used to smooth out the grid. Admittedly, pretty expensive, but absolutely doable.

Here's what i'm trying to say. There are many ways to store energy. Flywheels, capacitors, reservoirs, hydrogen etc etc all of course with different efficiencies, but no one said it'd be easy to figure it out. What i'm saying is, that it's absolutely possible to do, and not impossible like Trump would claim.

In most cases, CSP technologies currently cannot compete on price with photovoltaic solar panels, which have experienced huge growth in recent years due to falling prices and much smaller operating costs.[8][9] CSP generally needs large amount of direct solar radiation, and its energy generation falls dramatically with cloud cover. This is in contrast with photovoltaics, which can produce electricity also from diffuse radiation.[10]

On March 04 2019 05:03 Nouar wrote:


I beg to differ, but photovoltaic IS the main source of solar power, at least in the French energy mix.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Énergie_solaire_en_France#Place_du_solaire_dans_le_bilan_énergétique_français
Sorry it's in French, but it lists :
Thermic solar power (heating things with the sun, direct use of solar energy) produced 0.4% of renewable energy usage in 2016 ;
Photovoltaic (directly linked to the power grid, with "zero output at night, at a maximum between 2 and 6pm") produced 1.9% of the national power produced in 2018 and covered 2.1% of the country power needs ;
Thermodynamic solar energy had a minimal contribution.

So while I find what you say very interesting leads, that's clearly not how it's being used currently, at least in Europe, and I imagine, everywhere else for production. So I'd like some links to further my knowledge, if you have.

What you are talking about is Concentrated Solar Power, which is seeing marginal use due to its high price, or experimental technologies that are being developed or have pilot deployments with low efficiency from what I see.

The Europe article, and molten salts intro.

However, the advantage of CSP over PV is that as a thermal technology, running a conventional thermal power block, a CSP plant can store the heat of solar energy in molten salts, which enables these plants to continue to generate electricity whenever it is needed, whether day or night. This makes CSP a dispatchable form of solar. This is particularly valuable in places where there is already a high penetration of PV, such as California[11] because an evening peak is being exacerbated as PV ramps down at sunset.

On March 04 2019 10:11 m4ini wrote:


You're arguing something else entirely.

Don't care what france does. That wasn't the issue. Read the post i quoted. Then note that i not once mentioned "europe" or "france" or "germany", but explained why Trumps suggested argument would be bullshit.

Yeah, france feeds roughly 2% into the grid through solar power. Germany feeds 8% into the grid through solar, 22% through wind, 8% biomass and rest hydroelectric - overall 40% of the entire grid is renewable energy. I didn't mention anything like that because it doesn't matter.

In regards to efficiency, PV panels, the best panels, have around 22% efficiency. And of course i'm talking CSP, because i'm also talking USA which the entire argument was about. Cloud cover means jack if you can build your plants in deserts and some of the driest places known to man. Oh and these 22% drop even further, because of course you need to convert that PV panel energy into something that you can actually store (which you need to do if you want to have a country run on it), whereas CSP by design creates energy that you can store easily.

I mean, it's literally under the wikipedia article you quoted.



Would these work in france or germany? No. Was never the argument though, so again, i'm not entirely sure what you're arguing here. As a sidenote, they do work decently in Spain, where CSP alone amounted to around 2.3GW, compared to the entire solar output of france, 6.6GW.

Yes of course they're more expensive than a PV plant. It's misleading though because the cost of a PV panel doesn't include the cost of converting that energy into something that you can store plus storage - which it does for CSP. Now i haven't done the math (and not going to), so i'm not gonna claim that PV is the same price after you add everything that'd be needed to run a country on it, but it certainly won't be that big a price difference, and definitely it'd be more complicated.

I'm sorry, while you might be correct in regards to most of europe, what i said is absolutely correct - you just applied your own goalposts to it. France, UK (especially in the UK, i suppose burning wet leaves would generate more energy than CSP here), germany etc doesn't matter when we're talking how Trump would react to solar power in the USA.

First, you don't use "solar panels" to create energy for a grid. Photovoltaic is what you put on your roof, but not in a power plant.