The Technical Difficulties of Solar
I just wanted to highlight a few things about solar power. Since the announcement of the New Green Deal, I have seen many opinions thrown around regrading “green tech” and “renewable” and “clean energy.”
Most of the comments regarding clean/green/renewables is deeply misguided. Not because they are “wrong” in any real sense, just simply they haven’t thought all the way through the challenges facing the big 3 renewable/green/clean techs: wind, solar, and hydro.
Here is just a little taste of the solar challenges:
Solar intensity: the sun doesn’t hit the earth equal in all places. (No, this isn’t about cloud cover, that comes later). Humidity, altitude, and slope all impact the sun intensity in any given location on earth.
For example, the sun is much more “intense” at higher elevations, less intense in lower elevations. The slope of the land changes the angle at which the sun hits a particular location.
Peter Zeihan, maybe the smartest dude on earth, drew up this map in regards to solar potential.
Red zones are where solar makes economic and environmental sense in the World. (strictly from a sun intensity perspective).
Orange zones are where solar intensity breaks even with current fossil fuels in terms of price and cost to the environment.
Yellow/green zones are where solar isn’t a good economic option since the solar panels can’t get enough juice out of the sun. So, in order to make solar an option in the green/yellow zones, so much infrastructure and subsidies have to go in that CO2 emission actually get worse over time. (If you price in the cost of making the infrastructure in the first place).
Take Germany, a country in an all green zone. How are things going for them?
From Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies:
“Although the country has made a Herculean effort to shift to a clean energy economy — in just the past five years government support and costs to consumers have totaled an estimated 160 billion euros ($181 billion) — Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions have not declined as rapidly as expected in response to the vigorous expansion of renewable energy, which now generates 40 percent of the country’s electricity. Germany’s politicians are even resigned to falling significantly short of the country’s 2020 goal of reducing emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels.”
As Germany scaled up solar and wind generation, electricity prices increased 50 percent.
There are 3 other huge challenges that solar faces. Hopefully just looking at this first one will cause people to reflect a little on the state of the engineering of solar.
