Categories
-
Recent Posts
- Oil choke points vulnerable to war, chaos, terrorism, accidents, & piracy
- Nuclear weapons must be reduced or we risk nuclear winter
- Fusion is already running out of fuel
- Peak Oil is Officially Here! World oil production peaked November of 2018
- Wood, the fuel of preindustrial societies, is half of EU renewable energy
- Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe
- Book review of “Chip War” and the Fragility of microchips
- The tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy
- Nuclear attack on U.S. could kill 90% of Americans
- What percent of Americans are rational?
- Book review of Lights Out. A Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath
- Off-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel
- Book review of “Prime Movers of Globalization: the History & Impact of Diesel Engines & Gas Turbines”
- Mental Health. Coping with the future: notes from Jackson & Jensen’s “An Inconvenient Apocalypse”
- Tesla Semi trucks hauling corn chips
Category Archives: Photovoltaic Solar
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2
[ Pedro Prieto presented an update on June 20, 2017 at the International Society for Biophysical Economics “Spain’s Solar Revolution Revisited: six years later” here: Pedro-Prieto_ISBPE_2017-Spains-solar-revolution-revisited.pdf. See the pdf for more information Losses in book overestimated and revised Before / … Continue reading
Posted in Charles A. S. Hall, EROEI Energy Returned on Energy Invested, Pedro Prieto, Photovoltaic Solar, Solar EROI
Tagged capacity credit, EROEI, EROI, solar PV
Comments Off on Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2
California could hit the solar wall
[ According to a Stanford University article below this introduction (followed by excerpts from two California Energy Commission reports), if California uses mainly solar power to meet a 50% Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), on sunny days, for most of the … Continue reading
Posted in Photovoltaic Solar, Renewable Integration
Tagged alternative energy, renewable integration, solar, solar wall
4 Comments
Net metering and the death of US rooftop solar
April 22, 2016 by Roger Andrews at euanmearns.com “Net metering” allows anyone with a solar installation to sell surplus solar power to the grid when the sun is shining and to purchase power back from the grid when it isn’t. … Continue reading
Will perovskite solar cells ever work out?
Van Noorden, R. September 24, 2014. Cheap solar cells tempt businesses. Nature #513 470-471. [Excerpts. Of interest because rarely do obstacles get mentioned in the news. Most are optimistic hype making it sound like a solution to the energy crisis … Continue reading
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1
Book review by Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic of “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”, by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall. 2013. Springer. Conclusion: the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain’s ideal sunny … Continue reading
Would Tesla, SolarCity or SpaceX exist without $4.9 billion in government subsidies?
[ Tesla has made no new battery breakthroughs. Batteries aren’t much better today than they were 200 years ago. All Tesla did was build a better battery management system (BMS) by stringing tiny batteries together — thousands of them. But … Continue reading
Posted in Debt, Lithium-ion, Photovoltaic Solar, Subsidies
Tagged altnerative energy, debt, renewables, subsidies, tesla
Comments Off on Would Tesla, SolarCity or SpaceX exist without $4.9 billion in government subsidies?
Short-circuiting a solar boom in Japan
Spain is still feeling the painful effects of the costs of overbuilt solar PV, and now Japan is finding itself in the same position. This article does a lousy job of explaining that the grid must be in exact supply … Continue reading
Posted in Distributed Generation, Grid instability, Photovoltaic Solar, Renewable Integration
Comments Off on Short-circuiting a solar boom in Japan
Is there enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuel electricity generation?
NREL. July 2012. U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This document is a thought experiment that uses GIS mapping to estimate how much renewable power could possibly be generated in each state regardless of … Continue reading
Solar Photovoltaics (PV) limited by raw materials
This paper (excerpts below) shows that there are limits to growth — there simply aren’t enough minerals in the world that can be produced physically and/or at a reasonable cost for the many of the most common kinds of PV … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Rare Earth Elements, Photovoltaic Solar
Tagged rare earth
Comments Off on Solar Photovoltaics (PV) limited by raw materials
Renewable incentives destabilize, harm electric grid
Wald, Matthew L. 7 Oct 2014. How Grid Efficiency Went South. New York times. Summary: 1) society would be better off if homeowners faced their rooftop solar panels westward, the peak time more energy is needed, but they won’t because … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Natural Gas, Nuclear Power Energy, Photovoltaic Solar
Comments Off on Renewable incentives destabilize, harm electric grid