Categories
-
Recent Posts
- Floating Solar Farms add plastic, metal, PFAS & cut off light and oxygen to life below
- Peak Lithium
- Trump eliminates birth control abroad
- In a world without people, how long would NYC last?
- Network States to replace democratic governments with billionaire Silicon Valley CEO dictators & Republicans
- Why the kerogen in oil shale will never fill up your tank
- ‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq
- Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America
- Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future
- The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot
- A transition from fossil fuels to renewables could take a century – if it ever happens
- Electrifying freight trains in the U.S. is a bad idea
- Why Nuclear Power can’t replace fossil fuels
- Energy, Water, & Climate Change are interdependent
- Why fusion power is Forever Away
Category Archives: Photovoltaic Solar
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2
Preface. Below is a book review of Charles Hall’s 2017 book, “Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics, and Sustainability“, that he wrote to discover why solar advocate EROI results are so much higher than what was … 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
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
Wind & Solar need thousands of tons of steel, aluminum, cement, concrete, copper but produce little energy
Summary of Sergio Pacca and Darpa Horvath 2002 Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Building and Operating Electric Power Plants in the Upper Colorado River Basin ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / VOL. 36, NO. 14 pp. 3194-3200 As you can see, Wind … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Photovoltaic Solar, Wind
Tagged alternative energy, coal, natural gas, plants, solar PV, wind
Comments Off on Wind & Solar need thousands of tons of steel, aluminum, cement, concrete, copper but produce little energy