Good. I’d much rather look at this than the gaping hole of some old abandoned coal mine.
Do I have some news for you: https://gravitricity.com/
They use surplus energy to pull up weights and lower them when energy is in demand, using the principle of a grandfather clock. They are using abandoned mine shafts because they are readily available for this purpose.
Yeah, that’s awesome!
That method doesn’t scale. 1 ton raised 1m gets you 12m in an electric car.
There are so many other Quarry’s and coal mines this could be done to. It would actually save the mine companies money as they don’t have to fully return the space to nature.
I always wonder how resilient are these solar parks when a big hailstorm comes. There were some really large storms in Germany in the last couple of years and they caused really serious damage in the cities.
Its a major design consideration and they do survive hailstorms. There are always going to be freak events with very big hail that they don’t survive but if you have one of those its not just the solar panels its everyones cars and windows and anything else remotely breakable in the area as well.
Not even enough to go back to the future.
It’s too late to go back to the future. The future was in 2015.
Is it correct to say the future was in the past, or is in the past?
Yes. The Germans have a tense for it: Futur II.
Use Futur II (= ich werde gelernt haben) to make assumptions about something that has happened in the past or will have already happened by a certain time in the future.
I’m all for it, but with plants of this size - or rather such an mount of relatively dense photovoltaic surfaces - i am thinking about the heat that these panels are generating. i am guessing it would be similar to such an area out of asphalt. if these panels were cooled the heat could also be used to warm massive heat storage tanks.
And by piping water to the back of the panel to cool it you make the panel operate more efficiently.
What is PV?
Photovoltaic
Cool cool cool cool cool… what’s photovoltaic?
Solar cells that generate electricity
Exactly as it sounds then! Thanks for spelling it out for me!
PhotoVoltaic
All with Chinese panels I assume
…and…?
Fear mongering about China seemingly has no end. Even their solar panels have some nefarious purpose, apparently.
Probably network connected and they all phone home to Chinese IP addresses about usage and other data.
Am I doing it right?
They’re scared they’re gonna have china spyware that steals the sun
Is Chinese spyware not a thing that exists? Is it only crazy conspiracy theorists that believe in this stuff, and so we should mock them?
Because if it was a real problem, this would be a good way to silence the criticism.
Of course it exists, so does US spyware, German spyware, British spyware Turkish spyware.
I mock people because they think China are trying to figure out what cereal they eat. It’s rational to have concerns, it’s irrational to only be concerned about China.
Well, kinda a problem if your objective was to not depend on dictatorships for energy
Strange, didn’t know that was in the renewable objective brief. I thought It was about reducing reliance on fossil fuels, not sticking it to chyna, silly me.
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That can’t compete anymore because the German government removed subsidies
Better decarbonise with Chinese panels than keep burning fossil fuels.
Still better than nuclear fuel refined in Russia. Or gas from Russia.
If you want to beat the Chinese at solar panels, you need to go back about ten years and find a couple million workers that will take $2/hr to make them.
I’ll look forward to updates on your progress towards this goal.
Australia sounds like it’s about to donate $2B to some grifters that are going to pretend they can do this domestically. They’ll take the money, produce nothing and live happily ever after.
Solar module production isn’t labour-intensive, much less intensive in low-skill labour.
A bit more than a decade ago, Germany was the #1 producer of solar panels, drastically pushing down prices with advances in technology, manufacturing, and automation. Then the government decided to slash all subsidies (mostly about capping feed-in tariffs for solar), without warning, and without phase-out. Noone was prepared for that kind of thing so all the companies went belly-up and the Chinese swooped in, buying the tech for cheap with money borrowed from the Chinese taxpayer and began to produce panels and sell them, again subsidised by state coffers. We later slapped them with anti-dumping tariffs but by then the domestic industry was already decomposing.
It’d stiff be cost-effective to build solar panels in Germany, the degree of automation is so high that higher wages balance out with higher transportation costs.
Australia though don’t get me started on Australia you’re structurally a 3rd world economy reliant on export of raw goods. You’re not even smelting that ore, just shovelling it onto ships.
