The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world. But to provide that kind of power takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators. //

Just as these charging stations find they can’t run without some fossil fuel backup, the retirement of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas is being delayed to accommodate the energy demands of an electric vehicle battery factory that’s under construction.

Blackmon said that these stories illustrate well the lack of thought going into the demands that will be placed on the grid with increasing amounts of electric vehicle adoption.

As those demands pile on, U.S. energy policy pushes to remove coal, nuclear and natural gas from the grid.

Blackmon said he watched all summer as the Texas grid, which operates separately from the rest of the county, nearly collapsed with the incessant heat. //

Musk has also been taken to task for his solar promises. Energy expert Alex Epstein ran a fact check on Musk’s claim that we could power the world with a small area of the Sahara Desert and “some batteries.”

Epstein calculated that enough battery storage to create a reliable grid would cost $590 trillion for the batteries alone. It doesn’t include the cost of all the transmission infrastructure. And the batteries would have to be replaced every decade.

Security researchers are warning that tens of thousands of photovoltaic (PV) monitoring and diagnostic systems are reachable over the public web, making them potential targets for hackers.

These systems are used for remote performance monitoring, troubleshooting, system optimization, and other functions to allow remote management of renewable energy production units.

Cyble’s threat analysts scanned the web for internet-exposed PV utilities and found 134,634 products from various vendors, which include Solar-Log, Danfoss Solar Web Server, SolarView Contec, SMA Sunny Webbox, SMA Cluster Controller, SMA Power Reducer Box, Kaco New Energy & Web, Fronis Datamanager, Saj Solar Inverter, and ABB Solar Inverter Web GUI.

It is important to note that the exposed assets are not necessarily vulnerable or misconfigured in a way that allows attackers to interact with them. However, Cyble’s research shows that unauthenticated visitors can glean information, including settings, that could be used to mount an attack. //

Exploiting vulnerabilities in the PV systems that Cyble found exposed online has happened recently, with hackers scanning the web for vulnerable devices to add them to botnets.

For example, CVE-2022-29303, an unauthenticated remote command injection vulnerability impacting Contec’s SolarView system was used by a relatively new Mirai variant looking for fresh systems to grow its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) power.

Steve Milloy @JunkScience
·
14,000 panel, 5.2 MW community solar array in Nebraska destroyed by hail storm last night.

This doesn't happen to baseload power plants.

https://notrickszone.com/2023/06/28/huge-nebraska-solar-park-completely-smashed-to-pieces-by-one-single-hail-storm/
9:42 PM · Jun 28, 2023

Shanghai @thinking_panda
·
In China, in the Shanxi province, there is a huge solar energy farm right on the mountain. Solar panels stretch for 80 kilometers. It looks as if the mountain was covered with a blanket.
(Shanxi is on the Loess Plateau which has nothing but silt and dust. Nothing grows there.)
4:23 AM · May 31, 2023 //

A professor of Geochemistry explained that solar isn’t all that “green.” Solar releases nitrogen trifluoride. What’s NF3’s impact on the environment? It is 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

https://www.chemservice.com/news/learn-which-chemicals-make-solar-power-possible/

American Deplorable ™
7 hours ago
Working in Texas I saw a solar array that covered hundreds of acres that was located on the edge of the desert.

The dust storms there are legendary and have been for millennia.

I was told that the dust reduces the panels ability to create power by as much as 70% at times so the utility decided to hire a full time cleaning crew to keep the panels working.

A dozen two man crews equipped with a side by side vehicle, squeegees and spray bottles spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week cleaning the panels.

Absolutely insane. //

bintexas
6 hours ago

1. Climate change hail takes out a field of solar power panels

2. Double the number of fields to combat climate change

3. Climate change hail (aka springtime in the midwest) busts up two fields of panels.

I am detecting the makings of a perfect grift

"We already know from early research that it is possible."

U.S. Department of Energy released the below-linked article that discusses the utility of "droop" or frequency/voltage-based regulation to manage active & reactive power flows (respectively) without the need for communications between power sources. If put it briefly, the author suggests that with droop control they can avoid the need for an EMS for a hybrid microgrid site. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/03/microgrids-for-anyone/ //

Let me start by agreeing that the droop control technique is an essential tool in any modern Microgrid control strategy. Not because it's the “be all and end all” of control methods, but rather it’s a very effective fallback strategy. No Microgrid control system supplier worth their weight in salt, wants to deliver a system that cannot manage communications failure events and whilst redundant communications are a solution, droop control is superior in terms of cost-benefit outcomes. //

Whilst the utility of this technique is apparent, the point that I return to is this is by no means a complete solution offering. A holistic Hybrid Energy Management system will provide:

1. Overall power management of both dispatchable energy sources and loads
2. Coupling and decoupling from grid tie-in point including support of:
   • Re-synchronisation
   • Seamless transition during network disturbances
   • Import/Export and Network firming functions.
3. Quality of Service management - ensuring the microgrid provides grid quality power (or better), to energy off-takers at all times.
4. Energy Shifting – utilising renewable energy collected during the day to offset peak consumption during the night; and
5. Microgrid Optimisation both in terms of:
   • Minimising levelized cost of energy (LCoE) in isolated systems; and/or
   • Maximising return on investment potential for grid connected systems.

The net takeaway is this – not only are we far more progressed in terms of control methodology for hybrid microgrids, but the cost of ownership is significantly less than what most, including the article writer believe possible.

For the week of December 12th to 19th, 2022, the state of South Australia (home to 1.8 million people and ComAp Australia’s head office) had its entire state’s energy supply generated from renewable energy. This is not just a significant milestone for South Australia (SA), but also clear indicator of the pace in which renewables have become integral to Australia’s national power system. As recently as 2020, it was then considered exceptional for renewables to power SA’s demand for an HOUR, so to have this leap to a week within two years is quite incredible. Better yet, it is predicted renewable energy (backed by firming storage) will be able to exclusively supply the state for up to a month by early 2023! 

The SOURCE® Hydropanel is a technology that incorporates multiple patented inventions alongside proprietary trade secrets, making it a one-of-a-kind renewable water technology that uses the power of the sun to extract clean, pollutant-free drinking water from the air. Collected water is then mineralized for ideal composition and taste, making premium-quality drinking water a readily available resource.

1. Solar energy powers the panel completely off-grid

2. Fans draw in ambient air and push it through a hygroscopic, or water-absorbing material, that traps water vapor from the air

3. The water vapor is extracted and passively condenses into liquid that is collected in the reservoir

4. Minerals are added to make perfect drinking water

Solar Panels surface area required to power the world:

how much surface area for solar panels vs. surface area of fossil fuel or nuclear power stations?

Once there were 17 reactors in Germany. Now there are only three remaining, all of which are scheduled to go offline by the end of the year.

The move to “clean energy”—without nuclear—has accomplished three things:

1. It has prompted Germany, and the rest of the EU, to begin relying more heavily on Russian natural gas as it “transitioned.” Putin, who has begun demanding EU nations pay for their energy in roubles, is now able to undercut the European economy at will.

2. It has created the highest global electricity prices per household in the world. In 2019, German households were paying 34 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to 13 cents in the United States. The price of energy has doubled since 2000, when Germany first mandated decarbonization, an effort that forced energy companies to purchase long-term inefficient renewables at high, fabricated prices.

3. It has meant the burning of coal. Even before Russia began cutting off supply, Germany was more reliant on coal than the United States. This week, Germany’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck, who earlier this year rejected a European Union label of nuclear energy as “green,” announced that in an effort to avoid future gas shortages—because cars can’t run on wind—the government would incentivize the use of more coal-fired power plants.

The “transition” to green that Germany began 30 years ago has not worked. In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050. With a move back to coal in 2022, it will surely be even later, if ever.

In 2014, the National Electrical Code included a new requirement. 690.12(1) through (5) A short requirement, only six sentences.

PV system circuits installed on or in buildings shall include a rapid shutdown function that controls specific conductors in accordance with 690.12(1) through (5) as follows.

1. More than 5’ inside a building, or more than 10’ from a PV array
2. Controlled conductors shall be limited to not more than 30V and 240 volt-amperes within 10 seconds of rapid shutdown initiation.
3. Voltage and power shall be measured between any two conductors and between any conductor and ground.
4. The rapid shutdown initiation methods shall be labeled in accordance with 690.56(B).
5. Equipment that performs the rapid shutdown shall be listed and identified.

But those six short sentences had a big change on PV system design. Gone were the days of simply wiring the solar panels, or modules, to the grid tied inverter or charge controller through a simple pass-thru or combiner box. Rapid ShutDown (RSD) has a noble cause. It is to protect the firefighters trying to put out a fire in your home or business. Even when they turned off the grid power to your house, and the inverter automatically shut itself off (in accordance with UL1741), the wires from the solar array all the way down into the inverter or controller were still live. In grid tied systems, they could have as much as 600VDC. Combine that voltage with a firefighter’s ax to vent the roof, and you have a disaster on your hands.

Rapid Shutdown gives the firefighters a way to also shut down the DC power from the solar array to the inverter. In 2014, it could shut it down to the area up to 10’ from the solar array, and more than 5’ of entering a building.

Many attempts at solar desalination systems rely on some kind of wick to draw the saline water through the device, but these wicks are vulnerable to salt accumulation and relatively difficult to clean. The team focused on developing a wick-free system instead.

The result is a layered system, with dark material at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, then a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of material, sitting atop a deep reservoir of the salty water such as a tank or a pond. After careful calculations and experiments, the researchers determined the optimal size for the holes drilled through the perforated material, which in their tests was made of polyurethane. At 2.5 millimeters across, these holes can be easily made using commonly available waterjets.

The holes are large enough to allow for a natural convective circulation between the warmer upper layer of water and the colder reservoir below. That circulation naturally draws the salt from the thin layer above down into the much larger body of water below, where it becomes well-diluted and no longer a problem. “It allows us to achieve high performance and yet also prevent this salt accumulation,” says Wang, who is the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Li says that the advantages of this system are “both the high performance and the reliable operation, especially under extreme conditions, where we can actually work with near-saturation saline water. And that means it’s also very useful for wastewater treatment.”

In some cases, producing one tonne of aluminum can result in 14 to 16 metric tons of CO2. //

In 2020, the World Bank released an oft-cited analysis called "Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” In this report, the authors identified aluminum as one of the minerals that would need to have its production scale by a large amount for the world to meet its climate goals. “PV was a large contributor,” Lennon said. “[This] made me think about the problem a bit more.”

However, Lennon said that the World Bank report assumed an early International Energy Agency clean energy roadmap, which predicted that only 4 TW of photovoltaics would need to be installed by 2050. This is a small sum compared to what many updated roadmaps are now predicting.

In Lennon’s paper, she and her team used the target of 60 TW, set by the most recent International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics (ITRPV). This would mean that the world would need to produce 4.5 TW of additional capacity each year until 2050 to reach net-zero emissions and limit global warming to under 2°C. For context, by the end of 2020, just over 700 GW were installed. //

From this data analysis, the team was able to predict the amount of aluminum the world would need by 2050.

The total came to 486 million metric tons to be used for frames, mountings, and inverter casings. To put this number into context, the world bank had calculated around 100 million metric tons. “Our estimate is a lot larger than the World Bank’s estimates,” Lennon said. “The amount of aluminum we’re going to have to produce is going to have to increase an awful lot from what we have now.”

The problem is not that there’s not enough aluminum in the world—as it is both quite common and fairly easy to extract. Rather, the required extraction and production could lead to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Producing one tonne of aluminum from bauxite—a common source of the element—results in between 14 and 16 metric tons of CO2 or equivalent (the paper assumes the process is done in China), Lennon said. “That’s really high,” she said, adding that the smelting process can be quite energy-intensive. “If your electricity is sourced by coal-fired power or fossil fuels in general, the emissions intensity [can be] huge.”

Work has been completed on the largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to have been paired with solar PV to date, with utility Florida Power & Light (FPL) holding a ceremony earlier this week.

Construction on the Manatee Energy Storage Center in Florida’s Manatee County was completed in just 10 months, having begun in February this year. The 409MW / 900MWh BESS is colocated with FPL’s existing 74.5MW Manatee Solar Energy Center ground-mounted PV plant.

Allowing solar energy to be used in evenings and at night or on cloudy days, the utility company — a subsidiary of electric utility holding company NextEra Energy — has placed 132 battery containers onto a 40-acre plot of land.

The BESS will charge at off-peak times with abundant solar energy and then discharge to the local grid at peak times, when power is most expensive and often at its most carbon intensive.

It will reduce the runtime of local fossil fuel power plants and will aid FPL in a plan to ease two 1970s-era natural gas power plants totalling more than 1,600MWh into retirement.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has slammed California’s plan for homeowners who use solar panels in their homes. The proposal calls for a discounted rate for excess power sold into the grid, as well as a monthly utility charge of $8 per kW to cover the cost of maintaining the state’s power infrastructure. Musk noted that the idea, which essentially penalizes sustainable energy, is “insane.” //

With battery storage systems, the PUC noted that excess power generated by solar panels could be held in reserve by the homeowners themselves instead of being sold back to the grid. The PUC also argued that the current system essentially translates to a multi-billion subsidy for wealthy homeowners that other utility ratepayers are paying for. //

According to the PUC, a review of its policy has revealed that its current systems are not cost-effective since homeowners with no solar panels are shouldered with the price of maintaining the grid. Unfortunately, most of the said ratepayers were from lower-income households. And considering that ratepayers from the state spent about $3 billion a year to support net metering, PUC Commissioner Martha Guzman Aceves noted that the funds are better used elsewhere.

Study describes passive cooling system that aims to help impoverished communities, reduce cooling and heating costs, lower CO2 emissions. //

A study published on February 8, 2021, in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science describes a uniquely designed radiative cooling system that:

Lowered the temperature inside a test system in an outdoor environment under direct sunlight by more than 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit).

Lowered the temperature of the test box in a laboratory, meant to simulate the night, by more than 14 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit).

Simultaneously captured enough solar power that can be used to heat water to about 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

While the system tested was only 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) squared, it could eventually be scaled up to cover rooftops, engineers say, with the goal of reducing society’s reliance on fossil fuels for cooling and heating. It also could aid communities with limited access to electricity.

A simple cooling system driven by the capture of passive solar energy could provide low-cost food refrigeration and living space cooling for impoverished communities with no access to the electricity grid. The system, which has no electrical components, exploits the powerful cooling effect that occurs when certain salts are dissolved in water. After each cooling cycle, the system uses solar energy to evaporate the water and regenerate the salt, ready for reuse. //

After comparing a range of salts, ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) proved to be the standout performer, with a cooling power more than four times greater than its closest competitor, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl). The ammonium nitrate salt’s exceptional cooling power can be attributed to its high solubility. “NH4NO3’s solubility reached 208 grams per 100 grams of water, whereas the other salts were generally below 100 grams,” Wenbin says. “This salt’s other advantage is that it is very cheap and already widely used as fertilizer,” he adds.

The system has good potential for food storage applications, the team showed. When the salt was gradually dissolved in water in a metal cup placed inside a polystyrene foam box, the temperature of the cup fell from room temperature to around 3.6 degrees Celsius and remained below 15 degrees Celsius for over 15 hours. //

Reference: ” Conversion and storage of solar energy for cooling” by Wenbin Wang, Yusuf Shi, Chenlin Zhang, Renyuan Li, Mengchun Wu, Sifei Zhuo Sara Aleida and Peng Wang, 1 September 2021, Energy & Environmental Science.
DOI: 10.1039/D1EE01688A

New NEC requirement and stirring of state/local initiatives seek to address dangers DC power in rooftop PV systems pose to firefighters.

"In order to limit global warming, we will need to install terawatts of solar panels," says Lennon. "This will require a lot of metal. Silver is a limited resource and as it becomes more and more scarce, its price will go up so the cost of producing solar modules will rise as well. Mining silver from lower quality ores also produces more emissions, making the problem worse. Copper is much more available as a resource, it’s cheaper and it’s also easier to recycle. The metal from copper-plated solar modules will be easier to recover from old modules and therefore may be more easily recycled in the future. This helps enormously from a sustainability perspective.”

The team's 25.54 percent topples the previous efficiency record for a commercial-sized silicon solar cell of 25.26 percent held by Chinese company Longi. Other silicon solar cells have pushed out beyond this in laboratory settings, but achieving such performance in a commercially-sized cell, using copper in place of silver no less, is a notable step forward for the industry.

Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds //

Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs. //

A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of INSEAD, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash." //

The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.

“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.” //

The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.

“Alarming as they are,” they write, “these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.”

Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.

IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames. //

It’s now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.

And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.

The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called “genocide.”

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.