Quote from: Hidyo on November 26, 2024, 14:33:39I not sure you are making sense. At high latitudes, intermittency is an unsolved issue.
You are confusing something, there is a difference of "for personal use" and "for grid use". Outside of personal use, solar is bundled with wind, hydro, geothermal, storage, transmission, demand response and etc. Intermittency has long been a solved issue.
QuoteThe amount of batteries has been calculated to compensate by various sources and most accurately by Finland GTK. The material requirement is enormous.
Again you are misunderstanding personal use with grid use. The main purpose of batteries is for home storage and in case of the grid, FCAS. Other than that, they do short term peak storage. Otherwise, there are much cheaper way to store energy than batteries. Things like pumped hydro and compressed air for example. If your end goal is heat, nothing beats thermal storage on cost.
QuoteIn the UK and Canada, typical monocrystalline solar can do about sustained 10% of their design capacity. We verified this with a friend who has a 30kW installation. He sells the electricity back to the grid and for the winter,he makes less than 1/10 of the amount of summer.
Not surprising since crystalline cells are known for having high peaks but do worse in lower lighting. Especially more so with string inverters who need a minimum to turn on. On top of that, in the case of house installations, they don't do tracking.
QuoteGermany began purchasing a lot more coal after the pipeline incident. So did a lot of European countries. This resulted in a nearly 8x increase in the price of coal. It led to South Africa, a coal exporter, being unable to supply high quality coal for itself because of higher prices for exports.
You are confusing panic with usage. Prices are based on futures, not usage. Here is coal consumption for electricity in Germany:
2018 - 806.69twh
2020 - 514.87twh (covid)
2022 - 641.76twh
2023 - 507.22twh
2024 isn't done yet but first 9 month saw a 39% drop in coal use
Europe's coal use is also down:
2020 - 3109.99twh
2022 - 3377.88twh
2023 - 2950.04twh
This is one of the problems with news headlines, they make bold statements about a short period of time, but when looking at actual data over time most of it is nothing.
But coal prices being up is true, mostly because after the prices went up after panic(4-8x that lasted till june 2023, then dropped), but they are still around 2x more than it was due to greed.
QuoteAs for Cali, the point was that regardless of the mechanisms of failure, you need secondary backups for critical infrastructure. This is the design rationale for gas and electricity in northern countries. Electricity goes out all the time but if it was used for heating and cooking as a single source, people would die in the winter when power went out. This is why many houses are still built with wood stoves.
This is why you decentralize the grid, no single point of failure. If electricity goes down, the solar panels on your roof+storage will give you enough to at least do bare minimum till it is back up.
QuoteThe use of electricity is not very common in the third world. Africa has its own petro development bank now called APPO, I think. Its entire premise is to generate any power for Africans. Abundant access to Electricity is mainly a Global North thing.
The issue of Africa is it being hard to build long wires that are quality spanning thousands of miles. Many countries there have 25% grid losses compared to around 4-6% for most modern countries. Then of course failure rates are high and people stealing wires to resell.
In south africa, there has been a huge solar boom because people are sick and tired of the government pushing centralized coal electricity that has been unreliable. So much so that coal consumption for electricity in south africa has been falling.
Even for the entire africa, coal consumption has went down slightly. Even gas consumption is slightly down.
Fossil fuels are popular because it allows a select few to have control be it government or the elite. Once people are dependent, it is hard to ween off. But the writing is on the wall, as more and more people and providers generate their own electricity and becomes self sufficient, things aren't going back.