Is solar energy a meme?

0.9% of production

eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

>solar is useless because it takes a lot of energy to heat up a substance with the highest heat capacity we have ready access to
wew how about you step back and give that another try

with that growth, not for long

nytimes.com/aponline/2017/07/06/us/politics/ap-us-renewable-energy.html

>nytimes.com/aponline/2017/07/06/us/politics/ap-us-renewable-energy.html
did you even read the article the uptick was from hydro which is the majority of renewables in just about every country.

Solar cultists are easily the most retarded people on earth

And they are never engineers, just political science majors who want to stick it to le ebil capitalists.

>dude Solar and Wind is enough to sustain us XD fuck coal and oil

And the worst thing is that the people claiming that garbage believe that they are "educated".

I fucking hate the Internet. Anybody who claims that it hasn't made people stupider is a retard.

>billion megawatt
>million megawatt

>"dude that's not 2000 km, that's a 2 gigameters, you fool!"
the post

>a viable energy source.
Well, it is if you don't use those crappy solar-panels.

Just like wind is viable as long as you don't use those horrible giant propellers and expensive generators.

i think they just have a fetish for renewables, they also seem to not know fossil fuels are renewable (biodiesel good, ethanol not so great)

How about nuclear fission

Or even... nuclear fusion!!!

No. It is a viable energy source that will devour all other energy sources

>Source, us Dept of energy
More like us Dept of oil lobbyists amirite? That being said solar has a long way to go before it's ready to carry the load of a fully industrialized country. Better go fission.

>implying that because something is in its early stages it will never be a useful technology
Leave retard!

Nothing wrong with Nuclear, hopefully it will gain more traction.

Hello cult member.

Because you can google the answers in 10 minutes. Allright then:

1) Terrestrial solar radiation is standartised by the NREL AM1.5G standard (pic related), you can look up the deffinition on the homepage or in [1]. The average power density is 1000 W /m2.

2) The limit for radiation to electrical power for the most common type of solar cell (silicon p-n-junction) is referred to as the Shockley-Queisser limit, and is around 33% [2]. Thus the average power solar cells deliver is around 333 W/m2. In practice, this value will be further reduced by clouds, sun tilt, shadows, and various other losses etc.

3) You need around 4.2 kJ to boil 1 L of water by 1 K, which is the caloric definition. For simlicity's sake, we multiply this value by 35 to arrive at 147 kJ for 1 L. If you have a solar panel with the area of 1 m2, you would need the sun to shine for around 7 minutes to harvest this amount of energy. On a hot day, to boil 1 L of water, you would need 15 minutes of solar irradiation on a 1 m2 solar panel. Let's assume an average shower takes 100 L, and you have 10 m2 area available, you would need to wait an hour to take a shower, assuming you do not use any energy storage.

Is solar energy a meme? Do the costs and the fatalities [3] justify the means? To produce 1 GW of power, you'd either have to build one coal plant, or cover 3/4 of Central Park with solar panels.

Would you like to shower in acid?

Sources:

[1] G.P. Smestad. Optoelectronics of Solar Cells. SPIE Press monograph. Society of
Photo Optical, 2002.

[2] William Shockley and Hans J. Queisser. Detailed balance limit of efficiency of p-n
junction solar cells. Journal of Applied Physics, 32(3):510, 1961.

[3] IRENA Secretariat. Renewable energy technologies: Cost analysis series. Technical
report, International Renewable Energy Agency, 2012.

This is the really long way to say what everyone knows. Solar sucks but is a supplement to a much more robust power infrastructure.

1 kilowatt per square meter of solar radiation.

About 30 percent efficiency. So 300 watts electricity per square meter.

All life on this planet has been driven by solar energy for 4 billion years. All fossil fuels are essentially condensed solar energy. All weather is caused by thermodynamic gradients driven by the sun.

Of course solar is a fucking meme.

Who is that semen demon?

Real life is more like 30 w/m^2 across the day and year.

Also solar energy is low quality: not dispatchable, tied to where the sun is so it has to be moved. The grid has to be upgraded; most estimates require about 4-5 fold increase in grid capacity.

Backup power is needed for when it fails so there is no actual capital saving.

Installation costs are astronomical.

So yes solar is a meme.

>Using outdated information

When built on the utility scale, solar is cheap as fuck. That's also the best way to build solar, since you don't run into the grid instability issues caused by a distributed system (ie individual homeowners).

Costs go up when you have to include storage, but anyone expecting to be on a renewable dominant energy production system anytime soon is memeing or strawmanning. You design your solar utility so that even at peak production it isn't the dominant generator. You pair this with a natural gas power plant (which can ramp up and down on a dime) to be your main power source, and modulate it around solar production.

Irregularities in solar production is also a strawman. With historical weather data and current weather prediction, you can generate a highly accurate prediction of generation from a solar utility, giving the natural gas plant a production timetable to work around.

is solar energy the main source of energy anywhere? water and wind are the main sources of energy some places, and with battery research getting a lot of buzz these days they'll just get more prominent. how can sun even compete?

Using a photovoltaic cell to heat your shower water is kind of dumb.

No commercial solar water heater does it that way.

and if you over produce to much solar energy you can just give it to surrounding places for free/sell it.

>that kid in the background

It has more potential as a viable energy source when it is closer to where it is being used, i.e. your roof. Clumping them all together in a solar power plant, wastes energy through the wires.

It is also useful if you running wires to an area is not practical.

Tits

I know that block island off of RI relies pretty much solely on offshore wind, with some kind of underwater cable to allow excess power to be transported back and forth between mainland and the island.

solar and wind work best as a means to reduce the amount the base line generators have to make.

on a sunny day. you can throttle back you nuclear/natural gas/hydro plants.