15 Comments
Mar 8, 2022Liked by Irina Slav

agree its a country by country issue too like saudi, some australia states are receiving alot of sun and arid land great for solar n wind in scale, issue only arise during wet season which are limited to few months at best and the occasionally typhoon

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Excellent thoughts!

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Mar 8, 2022Liked by Irina Slav

great article - excellent points - And countries like Saudi Arabia can fund solar and wind with their profits from oil and gas. A country by country plan for energy security is the right way to go! Thanks.

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Mar 8, 2022Liked by Irina Slav

Don't forget the energy "cost" to mine the massive amounts of raw materials needed for solar and wind.

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Is the real world EROEI of solar even positive? Optimists claim that the EROEI of solar is 4 to 7 over the lifetime of a solar project. Do they understand how bad that is?

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Good article. Thanks.

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Mar 9, 2022Liked by Irina Slav

Good article, David MacKay was taken away too soon.

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Good post Irina. I have done some work along these lines myself. The math isn't hard superficially, but no one in decision making authority seems to be able to do it. Every where we turn we find out how hollow the green energy promise is. Cheers

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Mar 12, 2022Liked by Irina Slav

Although I generally agree with this piece, the power density assumptions from the 2013 MacKay paper appear to be out of date.

Looking at public data from five utility scale solar farms in California built circa 2016, sized 235 to 550 MW(ac), yields an average power production density of 310 MWh/acre per year, or 77 kWh/m² per year. This power density includes all the area of the solar farm site, not just the panel area.

The given Britain consumption figure of 1.25 W/m² can be converted to annual production: 1.25x24x365 = 11 kWh/m² per year.

With UK solar capacity factor at about 11%, versus these locations in California desert at 30%, we can estimate Britain solar production at 28 kWh/m² per year with similar panels.

So, circa 2016 panel efficiency, we would "only" need to cover 40% of Britain with solar farms. But of course all the other issues remain with intermittency and the amount of overbuilding and storage required to maintain availability.

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Great article even if I'm reading it 5 months late. The insistence on net zero targets ranging from 1 to 3 decades is a lie, a childish, fairytale fantasy at best, I refuse to believe our political policy makers are ignorant of this fact. I find it laughable that most domestic solar installations have no hybrid functionality to provide the owner power if the grid goes down yet they'll happily pay 2x the real cost of the system usually financed at variable interest rates over many years.

Solar is a great and liberating technology for those living in the right climate but definitely not a global panacea to energy problems.

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