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ByteOnBikes @slrpnk.net

2mo ago

Incredible progress on solar power

27 comments

Imagine how most faster it would be without the oil industry propaganda against it
- And without right-wing politicians working hard to hamper it.
  
  and without the idiots eating it up
- If even 10% of the resource of the oil barons was put into battery storage and grid improvements, the entire electricity sector would be green in like 1-2 years.

Things that would look more impressive in linear scale
- It would be so beneficial to present these data on a linear scale. So few people understand log scales that the impact of this graph is being weakened.
  
  Also, I feel like it would be easier to understand a linear plot of "GigaWatts capacity added per day".
- https://xkcd.com/1162/

I'm working my numbers to add solar right now. Estimates are that we can offset 69% of our power usage. It will return 150% of our investment overall. That's based on a very conservative rise of 5% in energy costs.
Adding solar right now is really no no brainer imo. Prices are only going to rise, and much more than the current 5% annually estimate out there currently. Panels last for a long time, and even at reduced efficiency towards the end of their life span, it is still a net gain. By then they've paid for themselves well, well before this point.
Right now they give an average home value increase of between 6% and 9%. I think we're going to see that rise as energy prices rise. Especially if you can get a low carbon footprint rating on your home.
Things are only going to get hotter. I've been in e wa state for 27 years now. I've never seen the weather as wild as it is. It's been getting steadily hotter and hotter. Breaking triple digits was super rare. Now it's the norm. We're breaking high temp records left and right. Not just summer either. Offsetting that increase energy use is going to be a must for everyone.
- Theoretically, once you've installed the solar panels it should be cheaper to replace them as a lot of the wiring and hardware should still be usable. Which should cut down on future costs as well if you only need to replace the panels, not run wires.
  
  Which definitely supports my theory that home value will only increase over time.

That should be interesting to see per country

We get 127 million km² worth of direct sunlight at any given time. At the highest efficiency, we can get some 200 W of electricity from each m² of that. That's some 25 million GW. We'll only run out of sunlight in 70000 years at this rate of growth!
Yes, the post is probably about GWp, in which case you should more than double that if using solar-tracking panels or quadruple that for static panels.

How many gigawatts do we need?
- 1.21
- apparently around 25 terawatt hours is what the entire world uses
  probably would want to use more than that though so yeah, a lot
  
  Terrawatt hours (per year, I assume?) is a strange way to express power usage. It's like saying "my girlfriend lives only 60 km/h minutes away" instead of "1 km away".
  And the value is equivalent to 2.74 gigawatts of continuous power output. Which is way too low to be right.
  But it's what I'm finding online too. It's like nobody understands what the units mean and they only care about relative changes over time.
  I did find the statement that "the total global electricity [generation] capacity in 2022 was nearly 8.9 terawatt (TW)", which makes more sense.
  
  25twh is pre COVID, now it's almost 30twh. But only 18twh is coal/gas/petro. So only 50 years to replace that much with just solar at the current rate.
  
  so one gigawatt its like a thousand days, so we are talking 30 years to replace fossil fuels, unless the rate keeps expanding?

Should add how long it took for the world to install the first gigawatt of solar power.

So if we kept on that in three years we could have enough to power the entire world? Assuming we started with absolutely zero today?

This entire time period the opponents of solar power haven't budged.

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