[ExI] Small scale solar payback time (was Re: Planetary defense)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 02:13:54PM -0700, spike wrote:

> Pardon if I repeat the spirit of an earlier post.  It would be a game
> changer in plenty of people's minds if they would get on a plane, fly out
> somewhere in the middle of the western desert US, such as Boise Idaho, or
> Las Vegas (what happens there stays there but don't do *that*) rent a car,
> drive in pretty much any direction there is a road, look around.  What one
> will see, regardless of the time of year, is *plenty* of open nearly flat
> land, plenty of direct sunlight, and I think investment ops would pencil out
> at current ground based fixed installation costs.  I can estimate closely

You don't need extra land. 

Look at a typical day in Germany these days
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/34/34773/2.html

That picture is about 90% accurate, small scale producers
are not shown (the picture would look slightly better
if these were included).

> enough the cable costs, the load leveling by conversion of coal to octane

What are the server costs for a trackerless BitTorrent distribution?
Zero. It's all carried by the swarm.

What are the land costs, cable costs, transformer costs in decentral
solar? Zero. It's all already accounted for by end users. 

Oh, and forget coal. We're about to peak on coal, and in practice
you'd scrub carbon dioxide from air or flue gas, and pipe it into
your synfuel process along with hydrogen from water electrolysis.

> with external power from massive PV installations and so forth.  But it is
> important to go out there in person and get a good feel for how much open
> useless land is there.  Failing that, get on Google Maps and look at it.  A
> lot of that desert land goes weeks at a time between seeing a single cloud.
> 
> The one area where I may be dead wrong and cannot estimate, is the cost of
> defeating the environmentalists opposed to massive ground based solar, and

YOU DO NOT NEED MASSIVE GROUND BASED SOLAR. Small scale installations
dominate in Germany. It's currently at 3% but provides >20% of total
peak demand. 2-3 doublings and it will provide >100% of total demand
peak. 

> of course the current energy companies which may hire environmentalists to
> defeat such a notion.  That could be huge, perhaps a show stopper.

I don't see environmentalists here hating on solar wind and geothermal. 
If yours do (really?), they're obviously fake environmentalists.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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