Comment on Anon questions our energy sector
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 13 hours agoThere is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
Well, I don’t know about you, but the nearest hill to me is 200km away, and a whopping 300 meters above me.
Also, scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I ha etl
So let’s store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).
Let’s round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that’s 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitants.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
And hey, you know what, that’s almost got a point. Firstly, I’m in the US, and I’ll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.
Now, let’s get into your claims against the Netherlands case, aside from the ad-hominem of your incredibly condescending tone. Let’s do some “basic fucking maths”, thou king of Numenor:
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
[1] www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_electrici… [3] aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/…/4 - ARES.pdf
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
You’re right in that I used yearly numbers and wrongly used them as daily numbers. The stats are from the central statistics bureau, and unfortunately it auto translates poorly www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83989NED
The numbers include use of gas and coal for heating and industry, which often get ignored by people (mostly because it makes us look fucking terrible in renewable power stats).
It is, in fact extremely generous, if you’re using the solar+storage method. But let’s go with this and I’ll demonstrate what it means in practice.
You just made the switch from “energy used” to “electricity generated”. For a country that still does most of its heating with imported gas, that’s a big difference. The real amount of non-fossil energy is about 18%, call it 80% fossil.
So it’s 50% of 80% of 2600/365, or 2.8 petajoules. So that’s only 10 of those facilities. Not great, not terrible. But that’s not the point. Nor is it important that their demo facility has a height difference twice that of the whole country.
Let’s stick with the “one night of power store is plenty”.
That’s true, but only if you can use solar to power your whole day. In other words, to make do with only 1 night of storage, you need to generate all your power for 24 hours in December during December daylight hours. Assuming it doesn’t snow, one solar panel produces about .15kwh on a december day (working off of 2% of yearly production happening in december, and 300Wattpeak panels), or 540kj.
So you’re right, we only need to build 10 facilities twice the height difference of the entire country, to save one average night of power. Unfortunately in order for that to be true, we would also need to cover about 960.000 hectares in solar panels, which is roughly twice the total built up area in the country, including roads.
And that’s assuming you keep a perfectly level energy use throughout the year, and a perfectly level production during December. Neither of which is true, and generally the worst days for solar production are the worst ones for use as well.
On the bright side, if we can put down two extra cities worth of solar panels for every city, we’ll probably have no issues building 600m tall hills by hand as well.